What Makes a 'Good' Bonsai? | Bonsai-U

[Music] what is it that makes a bonai good what is it that makes one tree better than another is it some sort of list of characteristics is it a more formulaic approach or is it something more intangible and Indescribable in this episode of bonu will attempt to answer all of these questions and more I think probably one of the best places to start is to look at what makes a bonai technically good I remember when I first arrived in Japan for my apprenticeship back in 2008 one of the first phrases that I overheard my Oak Kata fujian saying to a customer when assessing a tree in the nursery was or in Kai dialect as would say it basically translates to this is a really good tree huh and I thought at the time like what exactly does that mean what exactly is that referring to so I think all of us are kind of familiar with the rules of bonai we hear about it all the time a lot of these rules stem from I think at least in a western context the teachings of John naka especially in his book bonai techniques 1 which was released all the way back in 1973 in that book John Naka talks about all of the characteristics that make up a quote unquote good Bon thae and it's a a very formulaic approach when it comes to building bonai kind of a paint by numbers approach which for the time and for distilling this information from a Japanese context into a western and specifically American context it was a great distillation of that information it provided a very simple and easy set of quote unquote rules to follow to build out the best possible bonai now in terms of some of the rules that John Naka discussed in that book he talked a lot about things like the rule of thirds for example which is a little bit different when it comes to the rule of thirds in say photography and Art and Design what John knle was specifically referring to was in assessing a tree from the bottom to the top of the plant looking at the bottom third of the tree or the bottom third of the trunk being essentially open and free of branching and foliage the central third of the tree having a good number of basic branches where some of the foliage starts to block the trunk a little bit and then the last third of the trunk is essentially covered by foliage all the way to the Apex now again this is a really good basic simple approach but does it actually apply across the board when it comes to assessing what a good tree is or a good bonai is versus a bad bonai [Music] now some of the other rules that I think all of us are familiar with when it comes to basic paint by numbers building of a bonide tree are things like looking at basically the base of the tree working way up to the trunk having a wide nabari or Surface root structure at the bottom of the tree having good movement and tape within the trunk where the base is thicker and it gets smaller in terms of diameter As you move towards the Apex looking at branching considering for example having branching on the outside of Curves rather than emanating from the inside of a curve looking at branches that do not cross the trunk for example if you're building a multi-trunk tree not allowing those trunks to cross one another all of these things sort of fall into what John Naka talked about and what you hear a lot about both in books and online in regards to the again quote unquote rules of bonai but do these rules really apply and do they really apply at the highest level when it comes to building a good quality [Music] bonai I think there is a major common misunderstanding in the west particularly in the United States about what makes a good quality bonai and it's again this idea that following these sort of rules and basic sort of structural setup for a tree is going to lead to the best possible outcome when building a bonai this I think really stems from the fact that a vast majority of the trees that have been brought over from Japan to the United States both uh before we had the really strict quarantine laws in the 80s and 90s and into the current day you know from 2000 onward with our very strict quarantine laws is that a vast majority of the trees that have come in have been in field grown trees mass production trees the reason being is that they're cheap in Japan because there's so many of them they've been overproduced so it's easy to acquire them for relatively cheap prices to bring them into the United States so when people see those trees come to the United States and then get resold for example those trees have to be resold at a profit in the US and it costs a lot of money to import them put them through the quarantine process you're going to end up losing a lot of those trees because they get weak because they have to be bare rooted in Japan before they're brought to the United States so by the time they go up on the retail Market in the US they're 10 20 sometimes 30 times what the value of that tree would be in Japan even at a retail price so from that perspective people see those trees they think this is a tree that was brought in from Japan it's a very expensive tree that must equate to Quality and that's in fact not the case at all those trees again are mass production trees most of which have come from takamasu down in in shikoku now again those trees are built with this sort of John Naka era idea of paint by numbers you know essentially basic trunks S curves in the trunks branches emanating from the outside of those curves uh a little bit of taper in the Trunks and a nice sort of General canopy that is easy to understand but easy to understand does not necessarily mean good quality now what about comparing bonai art to other forms of art like photography sculpture or painting are there some similarities in characteristics that would make a quality bonai better if we took those same elements from those other art forms and applied them to bonai so for example I'm sure all of you guys are familiar with the idea of building your trees out with the general shape of a scaling triangle meaning that none of the three sides are the same length well in general this is very true this will actually give you kind of a basic setup for building say directionality within the tree or asymmetry within a tree it's very similar when we're talking about say sculpture or painting or again photography that being said you can really very easily lock yourself into again this very formulaic approach to building your trees where all of the canopies all of the foliage pads everything within the plant falls into larger and smaller scaling triangles now in general again this is going to give you a good setup but take for example this Garden here in Kyoto at di tooi this is hunin public bonite collection here that you can come visit if you visit the city many of the trees in this collection here if not most of them do not fall into that scaling triangle shape as a matter of fact some of the oldest trees in this collection are some flowering apricots that are wild just incredibly sort of naturalistic trees that have been built essentially by man from the start but they don't have that sort of standard scaling triangle shape that's been overlaid onto the top of the design so they're still quality trees they're beautiful plants but they don't fit into that formulaic Approach at [Music] all now we could also assess bonai by using something like the Fibonacci sequence or by applying the Golden Ratio or the rule of thirds not John Naka rule of thirds but the rule of thirds that is utilized quite often in photography to a bonai and again these do sort of conceptually apply when it comes to building say asymmetry for example or balance and flow within a tree but they aren't the end all Beall so to try to force a tree into those shapes or into these sequences or you know into some sort of mathematical formulation is really not going to yield you the best quality [Music] results now what about the styles of bonide if a tree falls into the sort of ideal of a specific Style say moyogi for example as an informal upright or chokan as a formal upright or kengi as a Cascade does that then make that tree a quality bonai well here in the Japanese context anyway quite often at least from my experience the styles of bonai you know specific names for a style will be retroactively applied to a tree and the tree won't necessarily be built to fit the style rather than hearing that though what you're typically going to hear is a tree described as let's say sugiki right a tree with a good shape to it or U this tree for example might be referred to as uh sh which means a very classy tree not classic or classical in the sense of a style but more of a feeling that's applied to the plant so rather than thinking in terms of strict styles for bone time I would think more in terms of the aesthetic feeling that the tree gives you as the viewer and I think this is probably a more positive way of assessing whether a tree is quality or [Music] not [Music] now returning to that phrase that I mentioned earlier in Japanese or aana in Kai dialect meaning this is a good tree huh when it comes to whether or not the Japanese would apply that to bonai that are formulaic and how they are built you really won't ever hear them use that phrase describing a tree that will say mass-produced in shikoku as a matter of fact you won't see any of those trees at the highest level exhibitions here in Japan like the koku 10 or the tyon 10 so that's a completely separate industry from what we would consider to be the actual true bonite art industry here in Japan so when you go to an exhibition for example like the Koka Fu you know we take our tour groups there every year inevitably when people come out from seeing the exhibition for the first time without a doubt I will hear at least half the people on the tour say none of these trees follow any of the rules that I was taught they're all exquisitly beautiful they're exquisitly displayed they're just incredible to look at they give me an incredible feeling but none of them follow any of those rules and why is that the case and how were those trees built that way to give me that feeling without looking you know contrived or overwrought they look so naturalistic but refined and this to me is the start of assessing whether or not a tree is good or bad as a bone side it's again whether or not that tree gives you a certain feeling and I think more importantly whether or not the tree is [Music] [Music] memorable so the next question then is well what exactly makes a tree memorable and is every tree that's memorable to me going to be memorable to somebody else of course this gets into the very subjective nature of bonai as an art form and this is true for all forms of art but I think that what we can say is that when it comes to whether or not a tree is good or good quality it really is that sort of gut punch factor that you as an individual get when you view a tree and this could be influenced by your particular cultural context it could be influenced by an experience that you had growing up maybe you had a tree in Field behind your house that was the perfect tree for climbing and hanging a tire swing on and it was the Lone sort of deciduous broadleaf tree out in the middle of a field that had a big beautiful canopy and when you see something like that represented in miniature form it speaks to you in a very specific way now this is a good starting point I think when it comes to assessing whether or not the tree is good quality but then we need to take some of those elements that we talked about in the first part of this episode some of those basic kind of I'd say again paint by number of rules apply them to the tree and then Branch out from there so again it's not that those rules are bad and we should disregard them entirely they do need to be applied in some sense to the tree to get you an initial sort of starting point but the tree itself needs to sort of build itself out so to speak now we do that through again manipulating branches pruning branches back wiring branches defoliating but the tree in some sense is going to grow as it's going to grow it's going to shed branches it's going to maybe lose an apex it's going to maybe get a wounds on the trunk somehow through some sort of disease or pest infestation and all of these elements can be used and manipulated in a way to build the tree out and give the viewer a sense of grandeur and of age and of beauty and of again that gut punch factor that you as a viewer feel when you view that [Music] bonai [Music] now another factor that I think makes a tree memorable as a bonsai is this idea of what's called mikomi in Japanese which we've talked about here on the bonsu platform in previous episodes but it's this idea that the tree feels sort of settled as a bonai meaning that the branches feel like they're in the right spot refined but natural you know you know that the tree was built by man but it has this very naturalistic sense to it now this is different from the idea of building a naturalistic bonai that some professionals have sort of built out as you know their approach to doing bonai which quite often looks quite messy in my opinion and unkempt we're not talking about that type of naturalistic we're talking about naturalistic but refined so again you know that the tree has been manipulated by a person but the final results feel settled and complete and very naturalistic again so the branches you know look like they emerge naturally from the right locations within the tree again sometimes they cross sometimes you get a bit of a pigeon breast to the trunk but there's just a feeling that the tree gives you that uh it's just it is what it is and it's completed right I mean we know in bonai art that trees are never really completed until they're dead right this is a common phrase that you hear and it really is true because the bonai again will shed branches shed Apex is whole portions of the trunk made die so the tree is forever changing but through that process of changing the tree ages both in appearance and physically as well and you can start to feel this sense of again a settledness to the overall aesthetic appearance of the tree and I think this is one thing that you can apply or think about when it comes to assessing whether or not a tree is good or of good quality another thing that I think is very useful when assessing whether or not a tree is good quality or a good bonai is the difficulty factors so how difficult was it to build the tree into the state that you currently see it now for me specifically this applies to deciduous material especially smooth bark deciduous trees like Storia or Japanese maple if I see one of those species built out with a scarless trunk for example but still beautiful taper beautiful refined ramification a beautiful Branch structure in a winter silhouette form I'm much more impressed with the tree as being a quality bonai than I would be if I saw a tree that had massive scars on the trunk for example where it was obvious that it was trunk chopped at some point to build out the taper within the tree uh same thing when it comes to let's say junipers that have been grafted if they're expertly grafted you won't be able to see the graph sites and it will look incredibly realistic incredibly naturalistic but you know that the tree has been grafted because perhaps the Deadwood characteristics don't match the foler characteristics you would never see that in nature but having been grafted it's impossible to tell where those graph sites are so the difficulty Factor the expertise and the skill level of the artists that went into building that tree is something I think that you should take into consideration when assessing whether or not a bonai is of good quality [Music] all right so next up here let's talk about some of these Concepts as applied to selecting material and more specifically to looking at Raw yamadori like this Rocky Mountain Juniper right here now one of the best things to really look for aside from obviously all the movement and all the character in the tree is whether or not the tree is what would be refer to as a h noi in Japanese or a tree with good bone structure so what does that mean exactly well from my perspective what that means is it doesn't necessarily fall into this idea of again this left right back left right back cookie cutter type bonai that you're going to see in mass production nurseries what it refers to is do the pads or does the foliage end up in the right place really right from the get-go so when you pull a tree out of the mountains does it have all of the features that you're looking for both internally in terms of the trunk movement and whatnot and also can we build you know essentially that sort of scaling triangle shape out of the foliage without having to do a ridiculous amount of manipulation throughout the tree so just to break down these terms here or this term H noi H refers to Bones uh e refers to good and the no is a possessive so a tree with good bones right so I've had a few trees come through my Nursery here here in Nashville over the last few years it really did have this great bone structure to them I'd say probably one of the main ones uh which is a bit of an unconventional Tree in terms of typical bonai design was our famous Rocky Mountain Juniper that had the zigzag form to the trunk nothing on that tree really needed heavy manipulation although I did move a big branch in the back of the tree into a new spot but in general pretty much everything was in the right spot and it was just a matter of manipulating that into the correct growing position so that it turned out to be the best tree possible now this is another tree right here this Rocky Mountain Juniper that is in my opinion a h noi again a tree with a good bone structure the movement in the trunk is absolutely insane on this tree it's short squat compact the Apex is directly over the base of the tree it's got amazing movement with the sh and the Deadwood and the livein sort of intertwining within the trunk structure of the tree and the branches basically are already in the sort of natural scaling triangle shape so to build out a tree like this is actually very easy nothing will have to be manipulated heavily it's just going to require a basic sort of detail wiring to put things in the right spot and this tree has never been touched it was collected one year ago maybe about a year and a half ago by the guys at Back Country bonai out in Wyoming came here last fall so it's been in Nashville for about a year and uh nothing's been done to it other than cleaning up the trunk and cleaning out some unnecessary uh foliage areas like the crotch growth for example in some areas of the plant but but no wire has really been put on this tree at all other than a little bit on this Branch right here just to get it up towards the light you know this last year so we could keep it healthy but stylistically nothing has been done to this plant but you can see it already has that basic scaling triangle structure to it and again all the branches are soft they're emanating from good locations within the tree and it's going to make an instantly classic and beautiful bone now the one thing you might notice that's a little bit different about this tree is that giant gin feature that's sticking out on the left hand side this in you know some instances let's say in Japan for example might be viewed as too long and too prominent as you see it right now it's kind of hard to tell because the big directional pad on the left side sort of breaks up that gin but once this tree gets styled that gin will become much more prominent and it's going to be up to me styling this tree to make sure that I hide certain portions of that gin to keep it from overtaking the overall uh composition here and drawing your eye too much to that location so if this were in Japan I have a feeling that that gin on the far left side would probably be shortened significantly but I do not want to do that and the owner of this tree does not want me to do that because it's such an interesting and unique feature so this you know I think partly stems from Japan being a very small country and it's very hard to keep extremely long Gins like that and also Japan sort of uh you know aesthetically like we talked about before tending much more towards uh kind of a subtle appearance even with wild and crazy junipers like this there's still ort sort of this move towards a little bit of subtlety within the plant you know so that gin on the left hand side is very loud very big it will be very prominent in the overall design um but for me you know as an American building this out in an American context here I want to leave that the bigger the better the louder the more inyour face the more tension we can create in the tree the more interest we can add to the plant even if it's a bit annoying to move the tree and to maintain the tree with a big feature like that I think it it adds to the uniqueness of this plant right because if I were to cut off that branch on the far left side of the tree or that dead one on the far left side of the tree the tree would still be amazing but it would have much more of a simple kind of informal upright maybe slightly semic cascading with that big left Branch there appearance to it stylistically whereas keeping that on there adds a whole different element to the character of the tree and makes it a standout and and memorable plant so from my perspective keeping some features on the tree that might be otherwise obnoxious uh is sometimes a good thing we don't always have to bring things back into this again sort of perfect scaling triangle not only with the foliage but also with the additional features that are on the [Music] [Applause] [Music] plant now one additional thing that I think will really influence how you view bonai and whether or not you assess a certain tree as being quality and memorable is going to be your own personal cultural context so in the Japanese context here things like subtlety for example uh things like age elements like wabisabi yugan all of these components uh are sort of naturally ingrained in the mindset of the Japanese again being raised in this specific cultural context and when they assess a tree those are the things that they're looking for built into the plant and this is why the trees in Japan look the way they do it's not because of some formulaic approach that has built those trees here it's because of the cultural context the way that they view art this sort of communal understanding of what art and Aesthetics is this is why trees look the way they look here in Japan so my main goal in this episode was to show you that it's not about building trees by some sort of formulaic approach and that's not why those plants look the way they do here in Japan it's much much deeper than that and I think as bonite evolves in different cultural contexts around the world both in the United States and in Europe and in the southern hemisphere as well you're going to see different aesthetic ideals applied to trees and different sort of approaches to Quality emerge as a result of that now this is a little bit dangerous in some sense because it sort of gives people the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder exclusively and if I build a tree the way I want to build it and I think it's beautiful that's all that really matters but I think all of us are pretty aware that there is good art and there is bad art and I think all of us as human beings have a certain visceral reaction to ugliness and ugly art as well as a visceral reaction in a positive sense to Quality Art and things that are beautiful and this applies to bonai art as well well so I hope that this episode has helped open your eyes to how to start assessing whether or not a tree is good quality again it's a very difficult subject to discuss because of the subjective nature of bonai as art but take all these elements with a grain of salt as you begin building your own trees and as you begin assessing trees at exhibitions like the Koka futen if you ever do come here to Japan so thank you guys so much for checking out this episode look forward to seeing all of you guys next next time around and until then take [Music] care all right so what then oh God it's a pigeon okay

Channel: Eisei-en Bonsai Kyoto

Views: 49,751

Keywords: bonsai, Japan, japanese bonsai, John naka, bonsai tree, learn bonsai, how to bonsai, Bjorn Bjorholm, eisei-en, kyoto, kyoto bonsai

Id: KBJG4z7Qk_Y

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2024