The Sport of Bonsai

or

Notes from a Bonsai Beginner

By Chuck Dunbar

(reprinted from New Orleans Bonsai, October 1993)

I had heard of bonsai and seen photographs of the tiny trees, but I didn't know too much about it. I knew as much about bonsai as I knew about curling or bocce, the first an obscure wintertime sport played by Scots trying to stay warm huddled over a spinning rock on a frozen lake, the second a game played by old Italian men who can't throw very far anymore.

Bonsai is a very slow sport, a lot slower than, say, stock car racing. Like stock car racing, though, it takes constant tinkering. The sport is so slow that it could use a clock rule like chess has, but it would be a calendar rule. Instead of forty moves in two and a half hours a bonsai player would have to make forty trees in two and a half centuries. The sport is so slow that had Rip van Winkle played, he wouldn't have missed anything during his twenty year snore. The snail like pace of playing bonsai has served since ancient times as a model for municipal government.

I learned that bonsai is a sport that originated in China and has inscrutable rules. Inscrutable is a Latin word having a Japanese origin. It means "root of bonsai, something unseen, mysterious, tangled and constantly in need of water" Among the most inscrutable rules is that the little trees can't grow naturally to look like the big trees they would naturally grow up to look like. It's hard for me to imagine that the same people who invented fireworks, made up obscure rules like that.

There are a lot of rules about pottery too. It is easier to learn what silverware, plates and glasses to use at a twenty course state dinner than to learn what pots to use with what bonsai. Choosing the wrong pot is like wearing shoulder pads to a golf match. Really gauche. Gauche is a French word of Japanese origin meaning "not having the sense to pick the right pot". 

The bonsai game is played in three periods. Each period is twenty years long, which adds new meaning to the phrase "going the distance" There are no time outs in bonsai, but there is plenty of time off. Players whose trees outlive them get extra points added to their final score. The winners are the players with the most named trees. The names you are likely to encounter for outstanding bonsai are "Tom Cat Slouching atop a Board Fence Separating a really Neat Back Yard from an Untidy Back Yard after the Rain but before It Dries Off". Great bonsai players get their trees chosen to go into a museum. You know you've made it in the bonsai game when your tree grows in Brooklyn in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. 

Having joined the game well into the second period, I wonder how I am ever going to catch up. What I'm going to do while I wait for my plants to get twenty years old is start a business that makes and sells very detailed plastic copies of famous bonsai. They will have to be watered only once a month in the shower to wash off the dust. Water, by the way, is an Indo-European word of Japanese origin that means "colorless, transparent liquid occurring on earth made up of hydrogen and oxygen that is to be gently showered twice daily on bonsai, or else".