Bonsai enthusiasts thrive in a small world

Jim Hughes, the soft-spoken fourth curator of the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum at the U.S. National Arboretum, stands bent over a wooden table, squinting in bright sunlight with his nose and the khaki rim of a baseball cap almost touching the spindly needles of a small, 200-year-old Ezo spruce.

He holds pruning shears in his right hand while his left, gently probing for dead branches, burrows through the interior canopy of this multitrunked miniature tree native to the towering forests of the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

“You need to keep stepping back and ask yourself what shape you want the tree to take,” Mr. Hughes says, then turns to a group of middle-aged women peering intently as he prunes.

“These aren’t genetically altered dwarf trees,” he explains emphatically. “This tree and other bonsai would grow to a normal size,” he says, if released to their natural habitat.

Welcome to bonsai (pronounced bone-sigh), the art of dwarfing trees and plants. Container grown, judiciously pruned and painstakingly trained to evoke an artist’s image of a landscape, these diminutive specimens become not just minicopies of their taller brothers but Lilliputians with their own stories.

And welcome to the Bonsai and Penjing Museum, one of the largest collections of these pint-sized trees in North America. Established in 1976, with gardens, four pavilions — International, Japanese, Chinese and North American — and a tropical conservatory on the arboretum grounds, this shrine to minimalism showcases hundreds of expertly designed small trees and allows for a comprehensive look at the art form.

This weekend makes an opportune time to visit: The museum will be the site, tomorrow through Sunday, of the Potomac Bonsai Association’s annual Spring Bonsai Festival, featuring more than 100 exhibitors displaying trees and shrubs from their personal collections.

The umbrella group, with more than 350 members in 12 clubs, or chapters, from Lancaster, Pa., to Fredericksburg, Va., aims to promote interest in bonsai through education and events such as this weekend’s show, which will be the group’s 36th.

Experts from the association will demonstrate training, pruning and bonsai maintenance. Vendors, 14 of them, will sell the ingredients a bonsai artist needs — pots, soil mix, books, magazines, tools for pruning — and a variety of bonsai, from starter plants (the so-called pre-bonsai) to seedlings, cuttings or trees already in training for some years.

Past shows have drawn thousands of bonsai enthusiasts and curious onlookers. Club officers expect the same this weekend, because so many are so eager to see how it’s done.

The art of dwarfing

So, how is it done?

It takes a lot of concentration, Mr. Hughes says, and a lot of that “stepping back.”

Just as a painter does with a canvas, a bonsai artist designs a tree with a particular aesthetic in mind. The form might be upright, or raft-like if the tree has toppled over, or cascading as if the tree were growing over water. Mr. Hughes’ Ezo spruce is triangular in shape, with the apex on top but not perfectly over the center.

The museum’s trees carry an admirer far beyond Washington, and lead a viewer to imagine rugged mountains as portrayed in Asian paintings or wet crowded spaces deep in a valley.

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