![]() ![]() Pretty soon I was as excited about going to China to hunt for bonsai as going to Tibet to do my fieldwork with a remote group of pastoral nomads. Since I was traveling virtually every year to Tibet via Beijing, I got an import permit from the USDA and started finding all the bonsai dealers in Beijing and bringing one or two trees back with me when I returned home. I wanted to work with trees with beautiful trunks like those I saw in China, so I decided to import them myself. But I realized immediately that the kind of trees I wanted were not the less-developed starter trees most people worked on, but the larger, older, advanced trees I was seeing in China. I started studying with a bonsai artist-who had a studio in Erie, Penn.-and buying my first small bonsai. ![]() That all changed in 1995 when I moved to a new house that did have a fenced backyard. I would go to Lhasa through Beijing and happened to stay at a hotel that had a garden with beautiful bonsai, or as it is called in China, where it originated, “penjing” or “punsai.” I was greatly taken by the elegance and beauty of these trees, and started taking off a day coming in and going out from Beijing to look at penjing gardens such as the one at the Summer Palace.Īt the time I was living near campus in a house that did not have a fenced backyard, so there was no way to do anything about my desire to learn how to grow and style these beautiful trees. I first became aware of the art of bonsai when China opened up to research and I began to conduct fieldwork in Tibet in the mid-1980s. Read on for what our experts have to say about the timeless appeal of an art that bridges cultures and generations. She oversees the care of the bonsai collection. David came to Matthaei-Nichols in 1990 and has been engaged with the collections and their broad use in the university community ever since.Ĭarmen Leskoviansky began working at Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum in 2009. David Michener is the curator at Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum. He is also a longtime member of the Ann Arbor Bonsai Society and a founding donor of the Bonsai & Penjing Garden at Matthaei.ĭr. Jack Wikle is bonsai artist, teacher, and volunteer. The collection includes several spectacular Satsuki azalea that bloom in June each year. In the coming years Professor Goldstein plans to donate his collection of bonsai to Matthaei-Nichols. He is also a University of Michigan alumnus. Melvyn Goldstein is a professor in anthropology and co-director of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Scroll to read the complete story or click on the names below to jump to the individual sections.ĭr. We asked four experts to share their thoughts on bonsai and what it means to them: Melvyn Goldstein, Jack Wikle, David Michener, and Carmen Leskoviansky. Why do bonsai? What meaning does it have? How do we explain its appeal? Do we need to explain?” *Note: This story appeared in a shorter form in the spring-summer 2019 Matthaei-Nichols print newsletter.
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