I’d Rather Be Bonsai Gardening

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06] Katya Rucker: Hello and welcome to I'd Rather Be, a podcast about the hobbies and passions that make our lives fuller and richer. I'm your host, Katya Rucker. Today's episode is I'd Rather Be Bonsai Gardening. In each episode, we dive deep into a different hobby and the story of someone who has made it a major priority in their life.

[00:00:27] And if you're ever curious enough to try one of these activities out [00:00:30] for yourself, I do my best to include practical tips about how to get started. For today's episode, I had the opportunity and the privilege to interview my very own mother-in-law, Lori Herlin, about her passion for the art of bonsai and miniature gardening.

[00:00:50] In what may sound like an oxymoron, Lori has created a 100 foot long miniature garden that lines the side of her driveway. And it's [00:01:00] filled with bonsai trees. It has a little stream running through it and miniature details like a bench swing hanging from a bonsai and a little patio with a table and chairs. A person who's about three inches tall would be about the right scale for these little chairs and benches, which means that Lori's hundred foot garden would be almost half a mile long if it were at a true human scale. Here's Lori talking about what led her to become so passionate about miniature gardening with bonsai trees. 

[00:01:29] Lori Herlin: [00:01:30] So, I had sculpture and photography as hobbies, like since college really, and have this kind of, need to create things, you know, a very strong drive. I'm not happy if I'm not creating things. Unfortunately, I have more ideas that I have time to implement them, but I was mostly focused on sculpture and photography initially. And then in my last house in Houston, I got really into gardening and spent a lot of time developing the yard and the garden.

[00:01:59] Katya Rucker: When Lori [00:02:00] and my father-in-law Bob retired, they moved from Houston, Texas to Asheville, North Carolina.

[00:02:06] They were ready to say goodbye to those sweltering Houston summers and Asheville brings the variety of four seasons, none of which is super extreme. Every time we visit from Boston in the winter, I get very jealous. And Lori took those three main hobbies with her: sculpture, photography, and gardening. And she spent her first few years in Asheville landscaping her yard and learning about the [00:02:30] variety of plants she could grow each season.

[00:02:32] Lori Herlin: So, it was really after about that 3-4 years of initially focusing on that yard, that a friend of mine got me interested in bonsai by inviting me to her house for a class. She had somebody coming to show her how to do a bonsai tree because she was interested. She now has two bonsai trees and I have over a hundred [laughing]. So, um, you know, because of the sculpture and gardening, bonsai was sort of a natural for me cause it's like sculpture with trees, you know, you're actually sculpting a live thing [00:03:00] and you're having to fold in understanding how the tree wants to grow and how it's going to grow as part of how you plan sort of what you're doing.

[00:03:08] So I really got into it, and it was the creating of the trees that was the fun for me, not just looking at them. I do enjoy looking at them, but, you know, I kept buying plants. I would go to nurseries and I would look for plants with small leaves and small flowers that grew slowly, or that were dwarf that start out not going to be out of control and I would bring them [00:03:30] home and I would turn them into bonsai trees. And it was, um, it was fun. You know, I had fun doing that. 

[00:03:36] Katya Rucker: So what exactly does it mean to turn a tree into a bonsai? I asked Lori to kind of set the stage and explain the core purpose or goal of bonsai.

[00:03:46] Lori Herlin: Well it’s to have a tree that is small, that looks like a tree you would see out in the real world. So it's a miniature version of a real tree and it's growing instead of in the ground, it's growing in a pot and the [00:04:00] bonsai is a combination of the tree and the pot and they spend a lot of time picking the right pot and the right shape. You don't want the pot to detract overly from the tree itself, but the right pot can really enhance the way the tree looks. And so it was really kind of bringing the outside in, so to speak. So the goal is to really, to make it look like a big old tree.

[00:04:22] And so what do old trees have? They generally have big trunks. They have branches that sort of droop down and then [00:04:30] grow back up again, that spread. A lot of times they’ve been damaged by different natural weather events and things. And so they're not perfect. And they have interesting shapes, and the more gnarled and twisted and things, sometimes the more interesting sometimes they can become. 

[00:04:46] Katya Rucker: This idea of imperfection in bonsai trees, whether from damage or from the wear and tear that comes from years of exposure to both good and bad weather is linked to the Japanese aesthetic, or some might even call it a philosophical [00:05:00] teaching, known as wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi is about accepting and really appreciating the beauty of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness that is a part of nature. This is why the perceived old age of a bonsai tree matters, because if it has dead branches or an older-looking trunk, it makes you think about the passage of time and seasons that can wear down on any living thing. Applying this concept to life more broadly, by accepting the idea that nothing is permanent and nothing is [00:05:30] perfect, we're free to live in the present and even face difficult life events without resistance or denial. Of course, all of that is much easier said than done, but who knew something as simple as a potted plant could bring these ideas to life in such a literal form? 

[00:05:45] Lori Herlin: So in the art of bonsai, what I've discovered is that there's a lot of manipulation that goes on to make things look much older than they really are. And to, to create these effects that happen over long [00:06:00] periods of time. And you can take a brand new nursery plant and you can make it look a lot older and you can create dead branches and things, um, you know, on purpose from live branches to, to get it, to look like it would look in nature. 

[00:06:14] Katya Rucker: A little later into the episode, we'll talk about the things Lori and other bonsai growers do to achieve these effects that make their trees look like they've aged naturally in a forest. But for now, I want to circle back to Lori's rapidly accumulating collection of bonsai trees, [00:06:30] and how her vision for her 100-foot miniature garden came to life.

[00:06:34] Lori Herlin: Um, the problem is I got so many of them. I had them all out on tables on my deck. I ran out of room. And then in the winter they have to be winterized, so to speak. And, um, so I decided to put some plants in my front yard. I had a lot of old landscaping that was kind of, had outgrown its space and wasn't that great to start with. 

[00:07:00] And so I built this raised bed to put some of my bonsais in as training, because having them planted in the ground lets them develop more quickly and grow more quickly if they're not already the size that you want. So, and everybody's always wanting fatter trunks when you're doing bonsai, because that indicates sort of age of tree and that kind of thing.

[00:07:19] So, um, once I put the raised bed in, I, um, the rest of the driveway didn't look like it fit in very well. So I thought, well, I'll just do a miniature garden [00:07:30] in part of the flower, the flower bed. And I was going to do just like a little short section, you know, maybe 10 feet long. And I built some mosaic patios down in my sculpture studio over the winter.

[00:07:41] And when I went to place them in the garden, it took up about 50 feet to spread them out and get the look I was looking for, because I wanted little sidewalks and a little running stream and that kind of thing. And so when you're halfway down, I might as well finish, you know, cause it looks funny to just have [00:08:00] regular big plants then starting up after that.

[00:08:02] So I made this hundred-foot long miniature garden, maybe the world's largest miniature garden, but, um, it became a home for my bonsai - it gave me more room to have more bonsais in training, right, because I had a hundred feet to work with to have these pots planted in the ground where they can survive the winter.

[00:08:25] That way you don't have to do anything to them. They look cute in the miniature garden.  [00:08:30] They look like little trees. And so it gives you a much more realistic look. So I was really after trying to develop a miniature garden that would look like some estate, you know, and have groundskeepers, you know. 

[00:08:44] Katya Rucker: This is where Lori departs from the traditional practice of bonsai, which has really focused on the contemplation of a single tree and the shape of its trunk branches and foliage in its pot, because bonsai trees are around the size of most houseplants, I [00:09:00] had the misconception that people kept them indoors and that Lori's bonsai trees would actually have a harder time surviving outside in her garden year round. 

I mean, do you have any bonsais that just can’t survive out in this climate?  

[00:09:13] Lori Herlin: No, most, most bonsais really are, um, they're trees. They're things like pines and junipers and spruces and things that are perennials and they have to live outside. You can't keep them in the house. They'll die if you try to raise them in the house. There's tropicals like ficus trees and -- [00:09:30] 

[00:09:30] Katya Rucker: Or like a banyan would be a tropical? 

[00:09:32] Lori Herlin: Yeah, that can live indoors if, if they have proper humidity, you know, a lot of times, people, you know, try to grow bonsais in their house and they die and it's because it's too dry. And like, I have a, um, a bonsai expert that helps me and he has some tropicals and he keeps them in his bathroom in the winter. Cause they get you know,

[00:09:50] Katya Rucker: The moisture?

[00:09:52] Lori Herlin: He turns the shower on and they get steam from the shower and that kind of thing.

[00:09:54] Katya Rucker: So a tree really needs to be a tropical species, like a [00:10:00] ficus, to survive indoors as a bonsai.

[00:10:03] Some of the most popular bonsai species are junipers and Japanese Maples, both of which need to spend their lives outdoors. Lori has these and many other tree species among her bonsai collection, but she's also discovered that ordinary bushes or shrubs make great bonsai candidates because their low trunks get super thick and old looking right away.

[00:10:24] When I first saw her miniature garden, I had no idea that around half of what I was looking at would be those low to the [00:10:30] ground, dense, unremarkable shrubs if Lori hadn't seen the bonsai potential in all of them. 

[00:10:35] Lori Herlin: What I'm doing is taking bonsai techniques and applying them in gardening, really. A lot of my stuff is not in pretty bonsai pots that are small. They're in larger pots that let the tree grow more easily and, um, and develop. Cause most of mine are -- I started this, you know, when I was in my sixties, so I don't have 20 years to wait for my tree to develop. I have [00:11:00] move it along a little faster or else by an older tree, you know? And that's why pulling old bushes and things out of landscapes is a great way to get a really cool tree that can look old in a hurry.

[00:11:13] And, um, I have the Japanese Maples that I pulled out of one part of my flower bed and turned into bonsais. I left the big gold mops that are already planted in the ground. I almost took them out because I thought they were too big and they were really ugly. I didn't like them. And once [00:11:30] I decided to try to trim them like a bonsai first and see how that looked.

[00:11:34] And I really fell in love with them after I did that, because it's a bright yellow spot even in the winter. So it gives you great color and they look like little trees now.

[00:11:43] Katya Rucker: And the wood is very smooth, and you know, doesn't have that rough look of most shrubs. 

These gold mops, which are a kind of Cypress shrub, heaven, enchanting, and almost cartoonish look to them after all of Lori's shaping to expose their smooth trunks [00:12:00] and branches. The foliage is kind of like that of the fictional Truffula trees from Dr. Seuss's book, The Lorax. Along this fairytale theme, if you were to Google miniature gardens, all of the top results give you different examples of fairy gardens, as in gardens for those tiny, human-like creatures with wings.

[00:12:20] And that's a whole world of its own. For example, in my Googling, I learned there's a fairy gardening festival in Ohio that happens in June every year. [00:12:30] It seems like the reason miniature gardens exist, by and large, is to serve as a home for fairies. I don't know how much of a true overlap you'd find between bonsai and fairy garden enthusiasts, but I asked Lori whether fairies were any part of the inspiration for her miniature garden.

[00:12:46] Lori Herlin: I’ve resisted, kind of, the fairy approach. And my mom is much -- she builds fairy houses and she wants me to put little fairy doors and houses into the wall behind the miniature garden and have fairies in the garden.

[00:12:57] And my friends have wanted to bring little [00:13:00] things over, you know, to put in there, but

[00:13:03] Katya Rucker: It's tempting. 

[00:13:04] Lori Herlin: It’s tempting, but I, I really, um, think that having just the garden structure and the patios and the empty chairs lets you use your imagination as to who might be there visiting. And that's more fun than having a real thing there that then focuses you on that. 

[00:13:19] Katya Rucker: I mean a kid could be playing with all kinds of sizes of dolls throughout, and, you know.

[00:13:24] Lori Herlin: Yeah, bring his dolls and play with the dolls in the, in the garden. So I think it's just more, [00:13:30] um, imaginative that way than having it too, too full of stuff, you know?

[00:13:34] Katya Rucker: Right. Okay. So no fairies for now. I'll be sure to report back if I notice someday that Lori's mom's fairy doors or houses have snuck into the miniature garden. There's something that's just so tempting about a meandering sidewalk through a forest of trees that are 10 inches tall. The next thing I asked Lori was if she could take me through a deeper dive into the process of taking a tree or shrub from an ordinary looking plant [00:14:00] and turning it into a bonsai. I asked her, how does it all start?

[00:14:04] Lori Herlin: Bonsais often are developed in the ground because that's when they're growing and getting big trunks and they're being trimmed so that they stay, the foliage stays tight and close to the trunk but the trunk keeps getting bigger and bigger, and then eventually they get dug up and put in a pot. Once you put them in a pot, they don't grow the same speed and stuff. And so generally, you know, people may have bonsais in the ground for four or five [00:14:30] years before they pull them out and put them in a pot.

[00:14:31] Katya Rucker: And so you don't typically start them in the pot?

[00:14:35] Lori Herlin: Right.

[00:14:36] Katya Rucker: Some bonsai growers do elect to start their trees in pots, but to Lori’s point from earlier, she wants to give her plants the chance to grow and develop more quickly.

[00:14:43] And even when a bonsai is started in a pot, it goes into what is called a training pot, which is bigger than a pot you'd see holding a mature bonsai tree. The pot environment is highly controlled. And this is evident in the type of soil bonds that growers use.

 Is bonsai [00:15:00] soil meant to keep growth more like, are the nutrients different? 

[00:15:05] Lori Herlin: Well, it's actually totally inorganic materials like lava and pumice and clay and stuff, and it's to give you kind of control over the plant. So you have to water them every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. You have to fertilize them every week. And then there's some other kinds of hard fertilizer you put in the, in the dirt with them to kind of give them snacks in between when you're giving them more fertilizer.

[00:15:30] So you're basically controlling, you know, kind of how much you give the tree.

[00:15:33] Katya Rucker: To learn more about the bonsai cultivation process, I visited a bonsai nursery called Bonsai West in Littleton, Massachusetts. Bonsai West offers a wide range of services and education to everyone from beginners to advanced bonsai growers. A devoted volunteer-turned-employee, Joseph Kapusanksky, showed me around the property.

[00:15:58] Joseph Kapusanksy: This is our outdoor classroom. Um, [00:16:00] we've finished up classes really for the year. But, you know, we'll offer a variety of classes from like very beginner to intermediate and expert. We try to avoid the word expert here, I guess.

[00:16:13] Katya Rucker: We got to talking about the central challenge of maintaining the ideal pot environment to keep a bonsai tree alive and healthy. 

How precarious, I guess, is the life of the tree? 

[00:16:28] Joseph Kapusanksy: Right, so, I mean, honestly, if you compare, um, you know, a tree in the [00:16:30] ground, um, a tree, you know, in nature is completely fine. We don't need, you know, they don't, they don't need us at all. Um, but once we put that tree in a pot, it is almost completely dependent on us. So that's kind of the, the responsibility that we take. And we do hold that, you know, to a very -- very closely, I guess. 

[00:16:54] Katya Rucker: Lori tells me that some of the tasks that go into the basic care of the tree include [00:17:00] repotting it every year or two, trimming it several times a year, making sure it has the right amount of fertilizer, and treating it for bugs and fungus as needed. 

[00:17:11] Lori Herlin: That's really one of the biggest challenges. You know, a lot of trees die deaths much earlier than what the tree could live for because of other causes. And so, you know, just imagine, flowerpots that you've had for years, all of a sudden the plant dies because it didn't get enough water one day or it got too much and got root rot, you know? And so you're really [00:17:30] having to, you know, growing things in pots, is difficult to maintain that right balance of everything the plant needs.

[00:17:37]  Katya Rucker: This maintenance never really ends, whether a bonsai is 10 or a hundred years old. But Joseph doesn't want this to discourage people and make them think they don't have what it takes to keep a bonsai alive. 

[00:17:50] Joseph Kapusanksy: But we don't want to like, you know, we don't want to scare people off in that way. It's just, this becomes a lifestyle, you know, you start to, um, you start to set your five minutes [00:18:00] each morning just to kind of check your tree, you know, look at the leaves, check the soil, see if it's moist. 

[00:18:09]  Katya Rucker: So there’s like a mindfulness aspect of it. 

[00:18:11] Joseph Kapusanksy: Absolutely, yeah.

[00:18:12]  Katya Rucker: I asked Joseph what he thinks people find most rewarding about the process of creating a bonsai tree when they take classes with Bonsai West.

[00:18:20] Joseph Kapusanksy: I think, um, technique is one of the big things, just because you'll, you'll see examples of [00:18:30] work in person or on the internet, you know, you'll see photos of things. And observing and studying other people's work is a really good way to start. But as far as the technique or the, um, execution of it, um, it can kind of feel like you're a toddler like playing in a sandbox where, you know, you're putting your wire on the tree, and [00:19:00] your wire is just an absolute mess. And you're like, okay, this'll work. Um, but when you, when you attend a class and you are, you know, you're kind of told, okay, like, this is the angle that you're wire is applied onto the branch. Uh, and this is how you should be moving your hand as the wire’s going around the tree.

[00:19:20] It kind of, you know, it kind of opens up a lot more avenues for you. 

[00:19:26]  Katya Rucker: The heart of bonsai is really the shape of the tree the grower is able to create, [00:19:30] and as Joseph mentioned, shaping happens primarily through wiring, or wrapping wire around the branches of the tree to get them to reposition over time. I asked Lori what bonsai growers are trying to achieve through this shaping process.

[00:19:44] Is it about achieving the illusion of some kind of motion based on the way the trunk and branches curve? 

[00:19:51] Lori Herlin: Well, it's trying to create a pleasing shape that you would like to look at for a long time, that’s interesting, you know. And generally things that show a little [00:20:00] motion -- and things were more interesting -- the motion can be very peaceful. It doesn't have to be, you know, you want the motion to be attractive, not, um, discordant or causing you stress, right. You know, sometimes when you look at things that if it's all jumbled up and you want to put some kind of order to it, you know, it feels stressful to look at it, you know?

[00:20:22] Katya Rucker: It might be hard to really break down why one bonsai is stressful to look at while another is peaceful or pleasing. But generally you want your bonsai to mimic the [00:20:30] proportions of a full grown tree. So it wouldn't make sense to have a small or thin trunk, but a really long branch, for example. Bonsai grows also intentionally decide on a front view for their trees, which is the side of the tree that gets displayed when you're looking at it head-on, and viewers should be able to see into the tree without too much foliage. obscuring their view of the branches. When it comes to turning shrubs into bonsai trees, Lori needs to coax a completely different shape out of the plant. 

[00:20:57] Lori Herlin: But you kind of want pads, like clouds [00:21:00] shapes, as opposed to just a solid helmet of a shape.

[00:21:03] Katya Rucker: Right, so something that is more shrub-like requires a ton of maintenance compared to something like --

[00:21:13] Lori Herlin: Right, and so like this, you can see all the way into the tree. And one of the sort of bonsai design rules is that you, you should be able to, um, have a bird of appropriate size to the tree be able to fly through the branches of the tree, right? There has to be, you know, space in there, but see how these [00:21:30] are just different pads and there's space between them that gives you a peek to the interior of the tree.

[00:21:34] Katya Rucker: The bonsai Lori is showing me is a Hinoki Cypress, and you can see a picture of this tree and the cloud-like effect Lori has created with the foliage on the I'dRatherBePodcast Instagram. Another intentional technique bonsai growers use to make their trees look old and austere is the creation of deadwood, where they preserve dead branches and dead sections of trunk on the living tree.

[00:21:58] A dead branch with no bark is [00:22:00] called a jin, and a bare section of trunk is called shari. 

[00:22:04] Lori Herlin: You’re trying to make the bonsai trees look as natural as possible. And in the real world branches die and the conifers, they don't rot and fall off like they do in deciduous trees. They hang around and they turn white and get bleached out.

[00:22:16] So this has, um, lime sulfur put on it to help it turn white. And, uh, it creates a contrast and it makes it look more like what you would see in the real forest.

[00:22:26] Katya Rucker: Lime sulfur creates the same bleached white [00:22:30] look that the sun would create if it were beaming down on large dead branches over time. Joseph also weighed in on the overall aesthetic bonsai growers are striving for as they meticulously wire, trim, and tend to their trees.

[00:22:44] Joseph Kapusanksy: You're not looking for that perfection. You're kind of looking for, um, um, I guess kind of, natural randomness. 

[00:22:55] Katya Rucker: Yeah. Right, right. 

[00:22:57] Joseph Kapusanksy: But still kind of calculated. Um, and so in a way, when you're trying to [00:23:00] play nature, um, your ideals are gonna get in the way of kind of the regular perfection of what nature does on its own.

[00:23:11] Katya Rucker: I could tell that for Joseph, this was more than just a job. He was clearly as devoted to his cultivation of bonsai trees as Lori is to hers. So as we were wrapping up, I asked him what was really driving his personal commitment to, as he put it, the lifestyle of bonsai.

[00:24:29] Joseph Kapusanksy: Speaking very personally, [00:23:30] I am one of those people who can't really sit still.

[00:23:34] Um, I'm always jumping from one thing to the next, and where it doesn't seem like bonsai is something that a person like that would be drawn to, I think just the seasonality of where we are always has me on my toes. I'm constantly shifting my gears from spring to summer. Okay, watering [00:24:00] is going to kick up a lot. Um, summer to fall. Okay. We, gotta start thinking about, um, breaking things down again. So, I think the enigmatic nature of it is, is really what draws me to it. I love seeing the changes of the, of the seasons. Um, we got all the blooms in the fall -- in the, in the spring and the colors in the fall. 

[00:24:26] Katya Rucker: There are so many reasons a specific kind of person might find joy or peace [00:24:30] in a specific creative pursuit. For Lori bonsai allowed her to bring her love of sculpture and gardening together in an enchanting and sprawling miniature garden. For Joseph, it's that mystery, that enigma of playing nature and harmony with the passing seasons that has him captivated by bonsai growing. And I'm sure there are dozens of other reasons to fall in love with it.

[00:24:59] So, there you have it, a glimpse into the miniature [00:25:00] world of bonsai and, at least for now, hold the fairies. I'd like to thank Lori and Joseph for joining me on today's show. This was the eighth episode of I'd Rather Be, and it's a big milestone because its release date, February 1st, is the day before the due date of my first child.

[00:25:21] So if you're listening to this sometime after the first, chances are, my life has already changed pretty drastically. But I do have the next four [00:25:30] episodes queued up for weekly release. So for now, at least the show will go on. But this means that I'd Rather Be, we'll basically be on autopilot for the month of February.

[00:25:41] So I'd love it if you could help keep the momentum going in two ways. One by sharing the show with friends or colleagues who also listened to podcasts, and two, if you haven't yet, by actually hitting the subscribe or follow button in whichever platform you're using. I've loved every minute of making the show [00:26:00] and all the amazing feedback makes it that much better, so thank you for your support. I'd Rather Be was hosted, produced and edited by me, Katya Rucker. Show notes for this episode can be found at idratherbepodcast.com. Have a great week, and thanks for listening. [00:26:30]