The Arnold Arboretum & the Larz Anderson Collection, Boston
I said I’d be back, and here I am.
Last time I came to Boston it was a business trip, with a small window carved out at the end of a working day for a bonsai detour. This time is different. Two weeks of vacation, the whole family, a route that runs from Boston up through Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, into Montréal and back down to New York. There are still bonsai stops carved into the itinerary – several of them are going to be significant – but the frame around them has changed completely.
That change is the best part. Bonsai has been a fairly solitary pursuit for me: early mornings in the backyard, evenings with wire and shears, trips where I disappear for a few hours and come back with photos nobody asked for. Walking into a collection with my wife and kids beside me, watching them slow down in front of a tree and actually look at it, is a different kind of pleasure. This art has a quiet charm that doesn’t need explaining. You just have to stand in front of it long enough.
First stop: the Arnold Arboretum.
A museum where the exhibits are alive
If you only know the Arnold Arboretum as “the place with the bonsai,” you’re underselling it badly.
It was established in 1872 and is the oldest public arboretum in North America – 281 acres of hills, meadows and winding paths in Jamaica Plain, laid out with Frederick Law Olmsted as one of the green links in Boston’s Emerald Necklace. It belongs to Harvard University but sits on city land under a long-term arrangement, and it’s free and open to the public every single day of the year. A National Historic Landmark that anyone can walk into before breakfast.
The Arboretum describes itself as a museum of trees, and that’s exactly right. The living collection runs to many thousands of accessioned plants, with a particular depth in the floras of eastern North America and eastern Asia – the fruit of more than a century of plant-collecting expeditions. Everything is mapped, labelled and documented. For a bonsai person this is quietly thrilling: you can walk up to a mature specimen of a species you’re growing in a pot and see what the tree actually wants to become when nobody is stopping it.
We took our time getting up the hill. Good decision.
The Bonsai and Penjing Collection
The bonsai live near the Leventritt Shrub and Vine Garden, about a half-mile walk up from the Forest Hills Gate, in an open-air pavilion.
The story starts in 1913. Larz Anderson, an American diplomat finishing his posting as ambassador to Japan, shipped home around forty dwarf potted trees, most of them bought from the Yokohama Nursery Company. The heart of that shipment was a group of large Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Chabo-hiba’ – compact hinoki cypress that had already been in cultivation for a century or more when he bought them. After Anderson’s death the trees came to the Arboretum in two waves, in 1937 and again in 1949, along with money to build a house for them.
Not all of them survived. Roughly a third of the original import is still alive today, which after a hundred and thirteen years in a climate nothing like Japan’s is honestly a remarkable number. The collection has since been expanded and now includes Chinese penjing alongside the Japanese material. The trees come out of cold storage in April and go back in around November – Boston winters being what they are, they overwinter fully dormant, just above freezing, checked weekly for water. It’s a reminder that this is a northern collection, and its calendar is not mine.
The oldest Chabo-hiba (hinoki cypress) is approaching three hundred years old. It has been under continuous cultivation longer than any other plant growing in North America. Stand in front of that for a minute and let it land.
Through Anna’s lens
One more benefit of visiting a place like this with my wife: Anna is a genuinely talented photographer, and she sees these gardens in a way I don’t. I’m busy reading nebari and studying branch structure — she’s watching the light come through a canopy, catching the texture of old bark, finding the frame I would have walked straight past.
What I actually thought
Really nice trees. Old trees – and the hinokis are the reason to come. There’s a density and a stillness in them that you can’t fake and can’t rush.
I liked the setting a lot. Open, unfussy, plenty of air and green around the pavilion, no attempt to over-design the experience. And I loved the stands: rusted steel posts topped with a plain wooden plate. Nothing precious about them, nothing competing with the trees. Weathered metal, honest wood, and then the pot. That’s it. I stood there taking mental notes for my own garden.
The honest reservation: it’s a small collection. Coming from Japan a couple of months ago, where the problem is that you can’t possibly see everything, the scale here is modest. If you’re planning a day around it, plan the day around the Arboretum and let the bonsai be the jewel in the middle rather than the whole trip.
But small isn’t the same as slight. Quality is the thing, and the quality is here – a handful of trees with genuine history, kept alive across three centuries and two continents by generations of people who never got to see how the story ends.
And the part I’ll actually remember isn’t a tree at all. It’s standing in front of the Chabo-hiba on a warm August morning, in a city I keep coming back to, with Anna and the kids next to me, doing something I love. That’s not a small collection. That’s the whole thing.
More stops coming. Some big ones.
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