As I hinted in my last post, that California trip didn’t quite end when I thought it would. While I was there, the conflict back home escalated, and my flight home got pushed back by a few days. But you know me – lemons into lemonade – I went to visit my childhood friend Gil in Philadelphia . Gil’s used to my last-minute “I’m crashing at your place” pings by now, and he’s always a great host — we usually end up in Philadelphia together when I’m over. This time with a twist: bonsai was now a priority. A quick search turned up something special just 30 minutes away — one of the best botanical gardens in the US, with a bonsai collection to match.
Longwood Gardens and the bonsai collection
Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is one of the great American gardens – over 1,000 acres built on the legacy of Pierre S. du Pont. Its bonsai collection began modestly in 1959, with 13 trees purchased from the legendary Yuji Yoshimura, and has grown over the decades into one of the finest collections in the country. A transformative gift from the Kennett Collection – the largest private collection of bonsai outside Asia – added dozens more trees, including some Kokufu remarkable large specimens. Today the collection lives in the newly reimagined Bonsai Courtyard: a serene, gallery-like space with hedges and charred-wood backdrops, where each tree stands alone on its own pedestal, given room to be seen as a work of art rather than one of many.
A small-world moment with Ofer
Here’s where it got special. Ofer Grunwald – my teacher Shai’s own teacher – happened to be in the area visiting family. Small world: Ofer grew up partly in this area, and he told me it’s the very place where he first fell in love with bonsai. He was happy to join me, and just like that, my forced layover turned into something else entirely. Instead of sitting in an airport hotel like a stranded refugee, I was walking through one of the most renowned bonsai collections in the US with one of the most renowned bonsai professionals.
The trees and the display
What struck me most was the way each tree is given its own space – no crowding, no competing for attention. The design lets you approach one tree at a time, really see it, before moving to the next.
Walking it with Ofer made all the difference. He’d stop at a tree and unpack it for me: how it likely became this shape, what the artist was probably going for, the choices behind the pot, the angle, the deadwood.
That kind of reading – layered onto a display already built for close looking – taught me more in an afternoon than I could have absorbed alone in a week.
Trident Maple, in Training since 1975Black Pine, in training since 1984Juniper, training started 70 years ago!
that special day brought me closer to Ofer, who’s become something of a mentor to me since. I feel incredibly lucky to have both him and Shai in my corner as I keep going down this path.
And that was it – the end of the April US trip. Two and a half very full weeks, business and bonsai woven together, with some of the best gardens and bonsai masters on both coasts along the way.
After a full week in San Francisco — Jonas Dupuich, the Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt, and more trees than I could properly process in a few days — I packed up and headed south to Santa Monica for another work event. Business trips have a funny way of doing that to me lately: I land somewhere for meetings, and somewhere in the itinerary a bonsai detour quietly writes itself in. This time, though, I got lucky in a different way — the weekend was entirely mine. No meetings, no calls, just two free days in LA. And you already know what that meant.
Where to go? Jonas had the answer.
Before I’d even left San Francisco, I asked Jonas where I should point myself in LA. He didn’t hesitate: The Huntington. And he did more than just point me in the right direction — he introduced me to Daniel Deephouse, the Huntington’s (relatively new) curator of the bonsai collection, who kindly offered to meet me there in person and walk me through the collection, including the parts visitors don’t normally get to see.
A high-level word on the Huntington itself: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens is a sprawling estate in San Marino, just outside Pasadena — originally the private estate of railroad magnate Henry Huntington, and now home to a world-class art collection, a research library holding treasures like a Gutenberg Bible, and more than a dozen distinct botanical gardens spread across some 120 acres.
You could spend days there and still not see it all: a desert garden, a rose garden, a Chinese garden, a Japanese garden, and more. I had exactly one focus in mind, so I made a beeline for the two gardens that matter most to a bonsai obsessive — the bonsai courts and the penjing collection in the Chinese Garden.
Getting in before the world wakes up
Having a special pass arranged by Daniel meant I could get into the gardens well before the general public — and that made all the difference. There’s something almost meditative about walking through a world-class garden completely alone, before the crowds, before the noise, with just the light and the quiet and the trees. I wandered slowly, in no rush to be anywhere, which is exactly the right pace for looking at bonsai properly.
Penjing vs. Bonsai — a quick primer
Before I describe what I saw, it’s worth pausing on a distinction that isn’t always obvious to newcomers (it wasn’t to me, a year ago). Both traditions revolve around cultivating miniature trees to evoke a larger landscape, but they come from different roots and carry a different spirit.
Penjing: Full Scenery in a tray
Penjing is the older, Chinese tradition — it’s thought to have originated roughly two thousand years ago and later traveled to Japan with Buddhist monks, where over the centuries it evolved into what we now call bonsai. Penjing displays often go beyond a single tree: rocks, water, and even small figurines can be part of the composition, and the aesthetic tends to be more dramatic and wild, chasing the untamed shapes trees take in nature. Bonsai, by contrast, is generally more restrained — a single tree, a single pot, a more internal and contemplative feel. As one Huntington curator put it, penjing can be extreme where bonsai is subtle. Standing between the two collections that morning, the difference was immediately visible, not just theoretical.
The Penjing Court
I started in the penjing collection, and it stopped me in my tracks. Unlike bonsai, several of these magnificent pines weren’t even in pots — planted directly into the ground, shaped over what must have been decades into forms of pure sculptural perfection. Combined with the surrounding lake and landscaping, the whole scene was simply breathtaking, more like walking into a classical Chinese painting than a garden.
Into the Japanese Bonsai Garden
From there I made my way to the bonsai garden proper, which is organized into two sections. I spent a long, happy stretch of time in the Classical Japanese-style courtyard — beautifully composed trees, each one placed with real intention, the kind of display that rewards slow looking rather than a quick walk-through.
Daniel’s Nursery — and a 1,400-year-old surprise
Then came the part of the morning I’d been most looking forward to: Daniel’s nursery, behind the scenes. I want to say again how genuinely kind it was of him to take a Saturday morning to host a random bonsai enthusiast visiting from Israel — the kind of generosity that keeps showing up in this community, trip after trip.
What surprised me most, honestly, was Daniel himself. I’d expected someone considerably older — every master I’ve met on this journey so far has decades of grey hair to show for their expertise — but Daniel is about my age. I couldn’t help but ask how he’d reached this level, this position, so young. His answer was refreshingly simple: he started bonsai when he was twelve.
He walked me through the nursery, tree by tree, and then showed me something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks — a juniper estimated at 1,400 years old. Fourteen centuries, alive, in a pot, in front of me. It’s one thing to read a number like that. It’s another thing entirely to stand next to the tree.
Heading back
I left the Huntington that morning quietly full — the kind of full that comes from beauty, not food. It’s remarkable how much a single tree, or a single conversation with someone who’s spent forty years with trees, can put the rest of your week into perspective. I headed back to the hotel to shower, change, and get my head back into meeting mode for the week ahead in Santa Monica.
But don’t worry — this wasn’t the end of the US bonsai run. Next weekend had more in store. More on that soon.
I started this blog somewhere over Japan, or maybe it was in a hotel room in Kyoto at midnight, trying to get the day’s impressions down before sleep erased them. What I found, and what keeps me coming back to write, is that documenting these visits does something the visits themselves don’t — it’s a kind of double processing. First you experience the tree, the artist, the moment. Then you sit with it again on the page, and only then does it really settle into you.
I have a few weeks now before my next trip, so before I get swept up in whatever comes next, I want to go back to April — back to California. It doesn’t feel recent. So much has happened since, Japan most of all, that April already feels like a different chapter of the year. But it deserves its place here, so let’s rewind.
Two Conferences, Two Weekends
April had me in California for work — RSA Conference in San Francisco, followed a week later by a Palo Alto Networks event in LA. Two cities, two purposes, and in between them, two free weekends.
San Francisco is not new territory for me. I spent fifteen years working for RSA before joining Palo Alto Networks, so I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve landed at SFO. I’ve always loved this city — the fog, the hills, the energy of it — and every visit over the years I tried to see a different side: the city itself, the Bay, the wine country in Napa, even Highway 1 running south along the coast. What I never knew, all those years, was that the Bay Area is quietly one of the great bonsai capitals of the world outside Japan. Some of the finest bonsai artists and collections anywhere are sitting right there, a short drive from conference hotels I’d stayed in a dozen times without a clue.
And then I met Jonas!!!
This is where I have to thank my teacher, Shai. I mentioned to him I’d have a free weekend in the Bay Area, and within days he’d put me in touch with Jonas Dupuich.
If you’re in the bonsai world, you know the name. Jonas is the person behind Bonsai Tonight, one of the most respected bonsai blogs and teaching resources anywhere, author of The Little Book of Bonsai, and co-founder of the Pacific Bonsai Expo, the biannual show that alternates between the east and west coasts of the US. He’s also, everyone will tell you, simply one of the kindest people in the community — patient, generous, completely without ego about a body of knowledge built over decades. I understood why within about five minutes of meeting him. He wrote back to my message almost immediately and invited me straight to his home to see his collection.
I won’t share the location, and I won’t share photographs of the garden itself. Trees like the ones Jonas has spent decades developing are, put simply, worth a great deal, and where they live is something the community protects carefully. But trust me when I say: it was extraordinary.
We spent a few hours together in his workshop, and at some point he let me put my hands on some of his best trees — trees I recognized instantly from books and films, trees I never imagined I’d touch, let alone work on. My hands were actually shaking. I’m still such a beginner in the arc of this practice, and here he was letting me near material that represented years, sometimes decades, of someone else’s patience. That kind of trust from a master is its own kind of teaching.
While we worked on a couple of pines, we talked — about his path into bonsai, what a full-time life in this art actually looks like, and about the Pacific Bonsai Expo, which he co-founded and helps run. I need to make it a point to attend one day, wherever it lands next.
Lake Merritt, in the Afternoon
Jonas sent me, for the second half of the day, to the Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt in Oakland — and I’m glad he did. It’s the only major all-volunteer bonsai garden in the country, built and maintained entirely by volunteers from across the Bay Area. It was first conceived in the late 1970s by horticulturalists Toichi Domoto and Bill Hashimoto, and finally opened in 1999. The collection includes some genuinely historic trees — among them a Daimyo Oak said to have been presented by the Japanese government in 1863, during Lincoln’s presidency, and a pine that was exhibited at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The garden has a sister collection in Southern California at the Huntington, both part of the Golden State Bonsai Federation.
What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t any single tree — it was the volunteers. Watching them work quietly on the collection, some clearly still learning themselves, absorbing technique from more experienced hands nearby.
There’s something very grounding about a museum-quality collection that exists purely because a community decided to show up for it, week after week, for free. I walked through slowly, taking it in, trying to watch the way the volunteer-artists watched the trees.
One Last Stop: Eric Schrader’s Cork Bark Elm
Before I flew back out that week, Jonas connected me with one more person — Eric Schrader, who runs Bonsaify and is well known in the community for his work and writing on bonsai design. Eric had a few trees I was especially curious about, and one in particular stopped me: a cork bark elm.
We grow plenty of elms in Israel — they do beautifully in our climate — but I’d never spent real time with the cork bark variety in person. The bark itself is almost sculptural, deeply ridged and textured in a way that gives the whole tree a sense of real age, even on younger material. It’s one of those details that photographs never quite do justice to; you have to run a finger along it to understand what makes it special.
That was the California chapter — or at least the first half of it. The next post picks up a week later, in Los Angeles, with a visit to the Huntington Gardens.
Two weeks ago I was still standing in Kimura’s garden, still smelling the incense at Hōshun-in, still carrying home a Gyouzan pot wrapped in more hope than bubble wrap. Japan does that — it doesn’t really let you leave. And then life does what life does: a leadership workshop pulled me to London, jet lag barely settled, suitcase barely unpacked.
I’ve been to London more times than I can count. Usually for Business meetings but also the occasional wander through the touristic scene between flights. But I had never once thought to ask whether this city — so full of gardens, so in love with its own green corners — had a bonsai story of its own. Turns out it does, tucked into Kew Gardens.
A word on Kew, for anyone who hasn’t been. The Royal Botanic Gardens date back to 1759, which means they were already old by the time most of my bonsai are just seedlings in someone else’s imagination. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, spread across some 132 hectares in the middle of a city that could easily have swallowed the land for something more profitable. I found myself genuinely admiring that restraint — that a place this valuable, this central, was left alone to just grow trees for the sake of growing trees. The Great Pagoda has been standing since 1762, and Kew even has its own slice of Japan inside it: a Japanese Gateway and garden built around a four-fifths scale replica of a Kyoto temple gate, brought over from the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition. So the Japan thread runs deeper here than I expected.
The bonsai house itself is a modest building near the Davies Alpine House, and modest is the right word for the collection too — somewhere around 60 to 80 trees, cared for by Kew’s long-time bonsai specialist. Many of the original trees came from a single generous donation decades ago, and the oldest among them have been sitting in their pots for close to two centuries. Small in number, but not without weight.
I carved out an early morning before the workshop started. Uber over, quick entry, straight for the bonsai walk — though “straight” is generous, since I couldn’t resist slowing down through the wider gardens on the way.
The collection, when I reached it, was smaller than I’d built up in my head — maybe twenty trees on display that morning. And here’s the strange thing about coming home from a pilgrimage like Japan: your eye changes. I found myself doing the thing my teacher Shai would do — pausing at a trunk and quietly noting the roots that hadn’t been worked enough, three branches sprouting from the exact same point on a trunk, which is about as close to a cardinal sin as bonsai has. A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have seen any of it. Now I couldn’t not see it. And yet — imperfections and all — I’d have taken any single one of those trees home in a heartbeat. That’s the joke of this hobby: you get more critical and more covetous at the same time.
Jamie joined me. We’ve worked together for about fifteen years, and this was his first real exposure to my new obsession. He asked all the right questions — the kind that tell you someone is actually looking, not just being polite. Jamie has a photographer’s eye already, so it wasn’t a huge leap for him to start reading a tree the way you’d read a composition: line, balance, negative space. I have a quiet feeling he could get seriously good at this if he ever let the hobby in the door.
We spent about half an hour there, and I found myself doing my favorite thing — explaining what worked, what didn’t, and why. Jamie kept coming back to the pots, which I loved. It’s an easy thing to overlook if you don’t know to look for it, but the pot is doing real work: a masculine pot — heavier, more angular, deeper — grounds a powerful, aggressive tree; a feminine pot — softer curves, lighter, shallower — lifts something delicate and refined. Get it wrong and even a beautifully styled tree can look like it’s wearing someone else’s shoes.
On the way out we wandered through Kew’s own Japanese garden — the pagoda, and a rock garden built in the zen tradition. It isn’t Kyoto. It doesn’t try to be. But there was something honest about it, a very English attempt at stillness, and I stood there for a minute longer than I meant to.
Then back to the Uber, back to slides and stakeholders, back to being the version of me that wears a badge instead of carrying shears. But I keep noticing this pattern in my own life now — how often the universe hands me an unplanned hour, in a city I thought I already knew, and points me toward a tree. I’m not going to stop taking it up on the offer.
Every great Japan trip ends with customs forms and existential questions about what you’ve done to your bank account. Mine ended with both of those things, plus a negotiation I never expected to have at Haneda Airport: convincing an Emirates ground agent that a nearly one-meter, 20-kilogram Gyouzan pot was, in fact, carry-on luggage.
Let me explain.
The pot had been with me since the very first day.
As I wrote in my Shunkaen post, it found me at Kobayashi-san’s garden before the pilgrimage had even properly begun — a massive, unglazed oval Gyouzan, almost a meter long and closer to 20 kilograms than I was comfortable admitting. The kind of piece that stops you mid-sentence. I bought it, made arrangements to collect it before my flight, and then spent the rest of the trip with the quiet knowledge that this thing was coming home with me, one way or another.
It had accompanied me — in spirit if not always in hand — through Omiya, through Kimura’s workshop, through the kilns of Tokoname, through the temples of Kyoto and the workshops of Shizuoka. By the time I arrived at Haneda for the Emirates flight to Dubai, the pot and I had a relationship. I was not putting it in the hold.
The Emirates agent at check-in looked at the pot. Then at me. Then, slowly, back at the pot.
“What is that?”
“It’s a work of art,” I said. Which is true. “It’s handmade. By a master. In Japan.” All of this is also true. “And it’s very fragile.” Absolutely true.
What I did not volunteer was that it weighed as much as a small child and was nearly as long as the check-in desk we were standing at.
After a consultation with a colleague, a supervisor, and what appeared to be a third opinion sourced purely for emotional support, they waved me through. The pot had cleared its first border.
I want to be precise here: it did not fit easily. What followed was a logistical operation involving careful rotation, two patient flight attendants, and a level of commitment from everyone in row 14 that I will never forget. But it went in. The overhead bin closed. I sat down and exhaled for the first time in about twenty minutes.
The cabin gets cold at altitude. Everyone knows this.
The flight attendant who noticed the blanketed overhead bin chose not to comment. I have enormous respect for her. An unglazed Gyouzan is a porous material. It feels the cold.
We landed in Dubai. The pot and I descended together — me carrying it off the plane with the grim focus of a man who has committed fully to a decision — and boarded the bus to the terminal.
There is something clarifying about standing on an airport bus at 5:30 am with 20 kilograms of Japanese ceramic in your arms, surrounded by strangers, thinking: I would do this again immediately.
The layover was long… The pot rightfully demanded its own sofa chair.
I got a light breakfast. The pot got admired by a passing traveler who asked if it was a serving dish. I said it was a bonsai pot. He looked at its dimensions and said, “what size tree?” I said, “that’s the question, isn’t it.” We understood each other.
Tel Aviv. Ben Gurion. The final stretch. I’d carried this thing from Kobayashi-san’s garden in Tokyo all the way across two continents, and now I was walking through arrivals with it.
Home. Almost.
Erez, the Taxi driver looked at what I was attempting to load into his car.
“What is it this time?”
“A pot.”
“Bonsai Again?”
“Yep, Bonsai….”
He Smiled…..
He helped me get it in. A man of good judgment and, it turned out, a surprisingly spacious back seat.
And there it is. Door to door, Tokyo to Tel Aviv, Kobayashi-san’s garden to my own. The Gyouzan traveled the length of Japan with me, cleared Emirates check-in on charm and audacity alone, spent a night in the Dubai lounge, and arrived home without a scratch.
Now it waits — as all great pots do — for the right tree. Something that earns it. Something worthy of what it took to get here.
The pilgrimage is over. The real work is just beginning.
My first weekend in Japan was reserved for an old friend. Jeff and I worked together at RSA years ago, and he’d hosted me on my very first trip to Japan back in 2015. The moment I told him I was coming, he insisted on clearing his weekend — and had the perfect idea: a drive out to Mt. Fuji.
We left Tokyo and hit heavy traffic almost immediately — which, in hindsight, was a gift. It gave us hours to properly catch up after so many years apart. Slowly the city melted away into mountains and trees, and the scenery turned beautiful.
But as we got closer to Fuji, the clouds rolled in thick. No mountain views today. Time for Plan B — and you can probably guess what that meant for me.
A quick search turned up Taishoen, a nursery in the area. Jeff, ever the connector, called ahead to make sure it was okay for us to drop by.
Taishoen Nursery — A Quick Highlight Taishoen is renowned for its shohin-sized bonsai and sits right at the foot of Mt. Fuji in Shizuoka. These days it’s run by Taiga Urushibata — son of the legendary Nobuichi Urushibata — who apprenticed under Kimura himself. Taiga speaks fluent English and welcomes foreign students for multi-month study programs, which come highly recommended.
What we found was nothing like I expected — a surprisingly large, state-of-the-art nursery I’d had no idea existed, tucked away in a part of Japan I hadn’t even planned to visit. Some of the best moments are the ones you don’t plan.
Taiga welcomed us warmly and gave us a full tour — stunning trees, and pots that stopped me in my tracks. One in particular: a Bigei. I called Shai on the spot for a second opinion. His answer left no room for debate: “Take it. Price doesn’t matter — it’s a Bigei. Take it.” So I did.
Jeff and I spent a couple of hours wandering the nursery — for him, it was his first time stepping into this world, and his curiosity about my new obsession was obvious. Don’t be surprised if BonsaiNomad gets a guest contributor someday.
We drove back to Tokyo as the light faded — tomorrow, back to work with the team in Japan. But the weekend had already given me more than I bargained for: an old friendship renewed, a hidden gem of a nursery, and a Bigei pot I’ll treasure for years.
If you’ve spent any time in the bonsai world, you know the name Bjorn Bjorholm. As the founder of Bonsai-U and Eisei-en, he’s brought hundreds of video lessons to enthusiasts everywhere — I’d guess there’s barely a serious bonsai person today who hasn’t learned something from him online. I certainly have.
Bjorn’s own story is part of what makes him so compelling: a Nashville native who apprenticed in Osaka, built his own center back home, and then — after years of sharing his journey online — made the leap to move permanently to Kyoto with his wife and daughter. Many of us followed along as he designed his new garden from the ground up, and getting to see it in person had been a quiet dream of mine for a long time.
Through Shai, my teacher and mentor, I reached out — and Bjorn said yes right away, offering me two full days at his place.
Walking into his garden in person, after watching so many videos of it, was something else. Every detail felt considered — the landscape, the stands, the rocks, the trees, even the gutters were quietly beautiful. It’s the kind of space that represents where so many of us hope to get to one day: bonsai as art and science, with an aesthetic sensibility running through everything.
The gutter!!
After taking it all in, it was time to get to work. Bjorn offered a few options, and since it’s pine candle season, we went for it — starting with mekiri (candle cutting) on a striking red pine that had once been part of the famous Kokufu exhibition in 1977.
The final result
Bjorn walked me through it patiently, and we spent a couple of hours working through the tree, learning to tell strong, medium, and weak candles apart. Along the way we talked — about my path into bonsai, the growing scene in Israel, his own journey. It felt less like a lesson and more like a conversation between friends.
From there we moved to a second tree — a raw, likely yamadori material from a forest collection — and started talking through styling options, beginning some early deadwood work.
before departing his house – had to have the last round again – to absorb it all….
One day this tree will be mine!
On the second day, Bjorn took me to Fujikawa Kokonoen, the nursery in Osaka where he’d apprenticed years before. It’s one of the legendary names in Japanese bonsai — Mr. Fujikawa is a master known for decades of refining some of the finest pine and deciduous material in the country, and the nursery itself is essentially a living museum of trees that have passed through generations of careful work.
Japanese Cedar – early stages but already perfect
As we walked in, we met Joe, an American apprentice just four weeks into the program. We joked that he was still in the “everything is amazing” smiling phase — and honestly, watching him watch Bjorn, you could see the admiration plainly. Joe’s Japanese is still basic, so having Bjorn there to translate with the oyakata was a huge help.
Joe was working on a black pine, and Mr. Fujikawa asked Bjorn to give him some pointers. There was something special about watching that — the expert guiding the newcomer, translating not just language but technique. When Mr. Fujikawa came over afterward to review the work, he seemed pleased, and through Bjorn he told Joe: it’s fine for where he’s at, but work slowly, don’t rush, be patient — if you work slow and smart, you actually get to a better result faster. Three generations of bonsai knowledge, right there in one exchange.
When Bjorn introduced me to Mr. Fujikawa, I went through the same ritual that’s become a thread of this trip — I gave him the last of my pomegranate bowls, which he clearly loved. He invited me to sit with him for tea, a welcome break from the heat, and afterward we walked through his garden together and took some photos. Before we left, he gave me a gift: a heavy suiseki stone. Lucky for me, my suitcase still had room…
On the drive back to Kyoto, we talked a lot — about the different masters and their approaches, but also about something more sobering: the sense that the level of bonsai material in Japan is quietly declining, as Chinese buyers acquire so many trees that they rarely get the chance to reach true perfection before being sold.
To round off the adventure, Bjorn suggested something completely different — not trees this time, but stones. He’s a Suiseki enthusiast himself, and on the way back to Kyoto we stopped at the confluence of the Kurama and Kamogawa rivers, famous for the unique stones found there — searching the riverbed for shapes that echo mountains and landscapes in miniature.
It was a strangely meditative experience. A couple of months ago I never would have guessed I’d be wading through a river in Japan hunting for stones — my wife Anna has always been the one drawn to suiseki, something I’ll admit I never quite got. Now, somehow, I get it.
After a while searching, we visited Kawai Kosoen, a collector’s shop unlike anything I’d seen — stones paired with daiza stands carved to fit their exact contours, antique suibans for miniature zen gardens, decades of quiet artistry in every corner. A calm, grounding way to close out the day.
That afternoon with Bjorn — trees, garden, stones, zen — captured something I’ll carry with me for a long time.
And with that, the bonsai pilgrimage comes to an end. As I start the long journey home — suitcase heavier with pots and a stone I definitely didn’t plan for — I’m reminded that the real weight I’m carrying isn’t in the luggage. It’s in everything I saw, learned, and felt: gardens built with intention down to the last gutter, masters guiding apprentices with patience across generations, old friends made new, and a craft that connects art, nature, and time in a way that’s hard to put into words.
This trip didn’t feel like an ending. If anything, it felt like a beginning — a deeper appreciation for the path, and a renewed hunger to keep walking it.
Until the next journey, Sanoyara Japan – and thank you for eveything you gave me!
I started my morning at Daitoku-ji, a vast Zen temple complex in northern Kyoto, founded in the 14th century. Among its many temples and gardens, I made my way to Hōshun-in — a famous bonsai garden I had known only from books and countless bonsai videos. I arrived just as the gates opened, and for the entire visit, the garden was mine alone — just me and the trees.
I walked the marked trail and went tree by tree, taking my time with each one. The collection is really impressive — pines, junipers, maples, all displayed outdoors on individual stands, numbered and labeled. If I could have a display like this in my own backyard one day, that would be a dream.
Indoors, the display alcoves – “Tokonoma” – showed me something I hadn’t fully appreciated before — the complete picture. A tree, a hanging scroll, a viewing stone, sometimes a second accent tree, all arranged together to tell one seasonal story. In one alcove, a flowering hydrangea sat beside a scroll of a swallow in flight, with a small stone on a tray beside them — sea, sky, and shore, distilled into three objects on tatami. In another, a juniper and a maple flanked a scroll, with a black stone shaped like a distant mountain resting on its own little stand.
Then there was a rock displayed completely on its own, no plant at all — labeled Yase Sudachi-ishi, a stone from the Yase area, presented with the same reverence as any tree. That’s when something shifted for me.
I sat on a bench for what must have been thirty minutes, just looking. Thinking about how six months ago I knew nothing about any of this, and now here I was, alone in a centuries-old temple garden, completely absorbed. What had brought me to this new passion? What does it actually mean to spend this much time and care on something so small, so slow? It led me somewhere bigger — toward what’s really important in life.
When I got up and looked again, I noticed the details I’d usually walk past: the overall garden setting, the moss, and — the rocks. Wow. These rocks. All of a sudden it hit me. This wasn’t just a nice garden with nice stands holding nice trees. It was the entire landscape — the sea, the mountains, the forests — compressed and suggested through stone and moss and form. The individual bonsai stopped being individual specimens and became elements in something much larger, the way a single stone in a Zen garden stands in for an entire mountain range.
As I walked away, I noticed more stones along the trail leading toward the garden — mountains, on the way in, that I hadn’t seen as mountains the first time. Only the trees, on the way in. The complete picture, on the way out.
From Hōshun-in I continued into the wider Daitoku-ji complex — a sprawling maze of walled sub-temple compounds connected by stone paths, red-lacquered gates, and centuries-old pines leaning over tiled walls. Daitoku-ji is the headquarters of the Rinzai Zen school founded in the 14th century, and many of its sub-temples hold their own karesansui, dry landscape gardens — where the principle I’d just stumbled onto at Hōshun-in is taken to its purest form.
A Zen garden uses rock, raked gravel, and moss instead of water and living plants to create a distilled, abstract landscape meant for contemplation rather than walking through. Raked gravel represents water — rivers, oceans, ripples around obstacles. Large vertical rocks represent mountains, islands, or sometimes a Buddhist triad. Moss suggests forest and the passage of time. And the empty space between elements is as important as the elements themselves — it’s where the mind completes the scene.
Walking these gardens after my morning at Hōshun-in, I couldn’t unsee it. Every rock was a mountain. Every raked line was water. The whole complex was one continuous meditation on landscape, scaled from a single bonsai pot to an entire temple ground.
I left Daitoku-ji slower than I arrived — which is really the whole point, I think. From here – to another part of Kyoto – Visiting Bjorn! something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. More on that soon.
There’s something quietly thrilling about a pre-dawn departure from Tokyo. The Shinkansen south earns its reputation – Mount Fuji sliding past the window like it’s posing, and you forgive it completely for being such a cliché because it really is that beautiful. Ninety minutes later, Nagoya.
Aichi-en: A Garden 130 Years in the Making
Nagoya doesn’t always make the bonsai pilgrim’s shortlist – Omiya gets the glory, Kyoto gets the mystique. But for pine bonsai at the highest level, Nagoya has Aichi-en (愛知園).
I’d reached out in advance, and it was Andrej who came back to me – a young apprentice from Slovakia, now in his fourth year training under Junichiro Tanaka. He sorted out the visit and was waiting at the garden when I arrived. The master came later that morning, so my introduction to Aichi-en was entirely through Andrej – and I couldn’t have asked for a better guide.
Four years in, sharp and ambitious, clearly devoted to the craft. He said something that stayed with me: sometimes it’s better to arrive with no bonsai experience at all. Starting from scratch is easier than unlearning years of bad habits. Real wisdom from someone who crossed the world to learn this properly.
Andrej walked me through the history of the garden – and straight to its most legendary resident.
Founded in 1896 by Sukijiro Tanaka, a farmer back then who planted a thousand apricot trees. One of them looked different. Something in its form caught Sukijiro’s eye and he dug it up and potted it. A week later, a tsunami hit the region and destroyed all 999 trees still in the ground. The odd one – the potted one – survived!!
That tree is still alive today. One hundred and thirty years old. Still standing in the garden it helped create.
It survived a second catastrophe too. During World War II, Nagoya was heavily bombed. Much of the garden was destroyed. When the smoke cleared, the apricot tree was still there. Twice the world tried to take it. Twice it refused.
The garden’s second great symbol is quieter but no less powerful – deciduous trees growing on a rock, an image that somehow captures everything bonsai is about: resilience, beauty emerging from the most unlikely conditions.
When Junichiro arrived, I gave him the pomegranate bowl I’d brought from Israel – the same gift I’d carried to Kimura. He held it, turned it over, genuinely appreciated it. He’s different from the other masters I met on this trip – more open, more modern, speaks English, teaches his students from the very beginning without the rigid formality you find elsewhere. Different style, different energy. No less inspiring.
Every garden on this pilgrimage has moved me differently. That, I think, is the real lesson. There is no single path to mastery in bonsai. There are only people who care deeply, each finding their own way to the same devotion.
Tokoname: Beauty and Melancholy
Tokoname is about 45 minutes south of Nagoya, and it holds a sacred place in the bonsai world. The old town is stunning – narrow alleys, clay walls embedded with discarded kiln pieces, ancient climbing kilns standing like monuments to another era. Walking those streets, I felt genuinely transported.
My first stop was Marutatu Isomura Shouten – a tip from Jonas, and one of the best pieces of advice I received on this entire trip. It’s a warehouse full of Tokoname pots from different makers – the perfect place to start.
The team there is wonderful – knowledgeable, warm, and deeply passionate about bonsai. I showed them a photo of the signature on a pot I had acquired years ago, without knowing who the artist was. Without hesitation, they reached for several thick, old reference books cataloguing potters’ signatures – a piece of living history in itself.
Within minutes, they had the answer: Kizan. An old master potter who stopped producing pots more than twenty years ago. They explained that he used different signatures for different styles of his work, and they had every variation carefully documented. It was remarkable to witness such expertise and dedication firsthand.
That moment alone was worth the trip. And then, of course, I bought pots. Classic Bigei pieces and more. It was stronger than me – I’ll figure out how to get them home later. Why worry now?
But alongside the wonder of Tokoname, something else crept in. A melancholy I hadn’t expected.
This is a tradition in decline. Many of the great pot makers have passed away. Others are too old to keep producing. The next generation has mostly chosen the big cities. Shops that once overflowed with famous Tokoname pots now stand largely empty – stock that won’t be replenished. A craft that may not survive another generation in the same form.
It made me hold every pot with a reverence I hadn’t anticipated.
Ikko Watanabe: Art in Silence
The team at Marutatu called Ikko Watanabe on my behalf – without them, the afternoon would have been a very different story. He came to pick me up from the station himself.
Ikko was waiting – warm, smiling, a man who’d never met me before but said yes to a stranger’s text without hesitation. He welcomed me into his home, where his workshop sits, and I understood immediately I was somewhere special. On the shelves sat his pots – exhibition-level pieces, hand-built the old traditional way. And among them, pots made by his father, who passed away fifteen years ago. Two generations of work, side by side.
We talked through Google Translate – perfectly sufficient for two people who love bonsai. He asked about Israel, about the community, about which trees we grow. His wife joined us, brought drinks and snacks, and we sat together for the better part of an hour. The kind of hospitality that makes you feel like you’ve known someone for years within twenty minutes.
Before moving on, Ikko connected me with Kakuzan Watanabe – another celebrated master – and pointed me toward the old town walking route. Kakuzan showed me his work, including his distinctive dragon markings pressed into the clay.
I left his workshop with one of his pieces – that unmistakable signature now coming home with me to Israel.
I did the walking tour. The kilns, the alleys, the walls of embedded clay.
And then Ikko came back to pick me up.
“Do you want to see how I work?”
There was only one possible answer.
I sat in his workshop and watched. No music, no conversation – just Ikko at his wheel, hands moving with a calm, unhurried precision that felt almost meditative. Each movement deliberate, each adjustment so small you might miss it. This is what a lifetime of craft looks like from the outside: absolute stillness in the hands, absolute certainty in the intention.
Before I left, I asked if I could purchase a couple of pots home. He walked me to the shelves. I chose one of his own. Then he pointed to one of his father’s. The gesture needed no translation.
Two pots. Two generations. Coming home to Israel.
The train to Kyoto that evening was long, but the kind where you don’t mind staring out the window. A full day behind me — Andrej and the apricot tree that refused to die, the old books at Marutatu, Kakuzan’s dragons, Ikko’s hands moving in silence, and more pots than I care to admit wrapped carefully in my bag.
Tokoname will stay with me. Not just for what I found there, but for what it made me feel: the fragility of beautiful things, and the importance of showing up while they still exist.
Some names you encounter in bonsai before you ever really understand what bonsai is. Kunio Kobayashi is one of them.
Born in Tokyo in 1948 into a family involved in floriculture, Kobayashi came to bonsai later than you might expect – he was 28 years old when he saw a Japanese white pine at an exhibition and something clicked. From that moment, he built a career that placed him in the absolute top tier of the art. A thirty-time recipient of the most prestigious awards in Japanese bonsai, he is sought after both domestically and internationally. If Masahiko Kimura – whom I visited just days earlier – is the rebel genius who bent the rules of bonsai into something wild and sculptural, Kobayashi is the master of classical refinement, elegance, and depth. Two different visions of the same art. Both extraordinary.
I had been following Kobayashi for a while before this trip — his books, his YouTube channel – and his trees had quietly become a reference point for me. The way he handles negative space, the stillness in his compositions. I wanted to see them in person.
Shunkaen Bonsai Museum sits in Edogawa Ward, Tokyo, founded by Kobayashi in 2002. From my hotel in Ginza it was about an hour by train – a long ride into a quiet residential neighborhood that felt a world away from the city center. When you finally arrive, the transition is immediate. You step through a traditional entrance and the noise drops away.
At the center of the main courtyard stands a Japanese black pine estimated to be 1,000 years old. I stood in front of it for a long time. Around it, over a thousand bonsai works are displayed across 2,600 square meters of garden and traditional Sukiya-style structures.
What made the visit especially memorable was the person who showed me around: Abdiel, an apprentice from Puerto Rico who has been training at Shunkaen for four years. Patient, generous, deeply immersed in the work. He walked me through tree after tree, sharing context and history, never rushing. Exactly the kind of guide you hope for.
The Indoor Chambers — A Story in Three Parts
Abdiel took me inside to the museum’s indoor exhibition area — a series of chambers where trees are displayed in rotation, brought in from the garden as needed since bonsai, of course, need proper sun and cannot live permanently indoors. The rotation itself says something about the care and intention behind every detail of this place.
What I encountered there stopped me in my tracks. Each display was not just a bonsai on a table. It was a complete composition: a bonsai on a specially crafted exhibition stand, beside a suiseki stone, beside a hanging scroll painting – each element chosen to speak to the others, all of them together telling a single story about a season, a landscape, a feeling.
A word about Suiseki, because until that moment I honestly didn’t fully grasp what it was. Suiseki are naturally shaped stones, collected and displayed for the landscapes they suggest — a mountain, a cliff, a shoreline. They are not carved or altered; their beauty is found, not made. And standing there in that chamber, it suddenly became clear: the bonsai is a miniature tree. The Suiseki is a miniature mountain. Together they recreate an entire world in a space you could cross in three steps. The bonsai I had understood. The Suiseki I had seen. But seeing them composed together, with the scroll completing the scene above – that was the moment I truly understood what the Japanese bonsai display is trying to do. It’s not decoration. It’s storytelling.
Abdiel noticed I was intrigued. So he took me to see Mr. Kobayashi’s personal suiseki collection. Remarkable pieces – stones that carry entire landscapes within them. A whole new world I hadn’t expected to walk into that day.
Meeting the Master
Then came the moment I had been quietly looking forward to since arriving in Japan.
Mr. Kobayashi appeared. Following the guidance of my teacher Shai back home, I had prepared for this – I knew the protocol. I introduced myself properly, and I presented him with a gift I had brought from Israel: a pomegranate-shaped ceramic bowl, a symbol of home. He appreciated it. In return, he gave me two books – one of them dedicated entirely to the art of suiseki. Given what I had just discovered that morning, the timing felt almost too perfect.
Pine Season in the Garden
I returned to the garden and continued exploring. It was peaceful – but also very much alive with work. Pine season had arrived, and Mr. Kobayashi himself was out among the trees with his apprentices, removing needles by hand to balance the energy distribution across the branches. Watching a master do the same patient, seasonal work that bonsai growers do everywhere – just on trees of a completely different scale and age – was quietly moving.
Mr Kobayashi in action
And then I saw it.
Tucked under one of the exhibition tables, as if it had been waiting there – a large bonsai pot. I crouched down to look at it more carefully. I had a suspicion. I asked Abdiel. He confirmed it: a Gyouzan pot. One of the most celebrated pot makers from Tokoname. A collector’s piece. And Gyouzan, I learned, had passed away earlier this year. These pots will not be made again.
I hesitated for exactly one moment.
Price wasn’t really the question – you can’t put a price on something like that. The question was more practical: the pot was bigger than my suitcase. I was flying back to Israel. I had already transported one large ceramic piece on this trip. But some decisions make themselves, and this was one of them. I purchased it. I still don’t know how I’m getting it home – as I write this, still in my Tokyo hotel, that problem remains unsolved – but we will find a solution. There was no other choice.
The End of a Beautiful Day
I made my way toward the exit. And then – a small moment that I keep coming back to – Mr. Kobayashi came out again, just to say goodbye.
He didn’t have to do that. But he did.
Great artist. Very kind man. I hope one day I’ll have the opportunity to return.
There are moments in a journey that you plan for weeks and then, when they finally happen, they exceed everything you imagined. My visit to Masahiko Kimura’s garden was one of those moments.
Let me start with some context for those who don’t know the name — though in the bonsai world, that’s hard to imagine.
Masahiko Kimura didn’t just push bonsai forward — he detonated it into the modern era. Born in Ōmiya, Saitama in 1940, he began his apprenticeship at age 15 under master Motosuke Hamano at Toju-en Bonsai Garden — a training that would last eleven years. But what came after is what defined him. His designs were first seen as controversial because they broke many traditional rules of bonsai — dramatic deadwood, impossible curves, living sculpture that nobody had attempted before. He became known as the “Magical Technician of Kindai Shuppan,” though apparently he never much liked the title. Today, his garden in Saitama remains a pilgrimage site for serious bonsai practitioners.
I had been following his work since I started this hobby — his books, YouTube videos, the junipers that appear again and again in every serious bonsai publication. When I began planning my Japan trip, visiting Kimura’s garden moved quickly to the top of the list. Not a “nice to have.” A must.
The problem: his garden is open to the public only by appointment. And the location? Quite confidential — understandable when you consider that some of his trees are valued at seven figures. I reached out through every connection I had. Doors stayed closed.
And then Bjorn came through.
I won’t say more than that — some doors open through trust and relationships built over years, and I’m grateful for the people in this community who share them. Bjorn arranged the visit and, in true style, equipped me in advance with a message in Japanese to show the apprentices.
When I arrived and walked up the path to the garden, a group of apprentices met me — mostly Japanese, and one who had come all the way from Peru. They asked who I was. I showed them Bjorn’s message. The moment they read it, everything changed — warm smiles, welcoming gestures, an invitation to walk freely through the garden until Mr. Kimura arrived.
What followed was something I still struggle to put into words.
His garden is like a museum, and anyone interested in Japanese bonsai will recognize at least half the collection from magazines and websites. I found myself walking alone among these trees for a couple of hours. No rush. No crowd. Just me and the most famous bonsai collection in the world. I recognized trees from books I’d studied at home in Israel. Trees I had seen in photographs for months, suddenly right there in front of me — close enough to touch.
Then Mr. Kimura arrived.
He is 85 now , and his health means he no longer spends the full day at the garden. But he came. I introduced myself in broken Japanese — something I had prepared, though I’m sure my pronunciation did it no favors — and presented the gift I had brought from Israel: a pomegranate-shaped bowl. A symbol of home, of abundance, of the land I come from. He looked at it carefully, seemed genuinely appreciative, and then walked with me through his trees for a few minutes, quietly, the way someone moves through a space they have tended for decades.
Then he went home to rest.
Those few minutes were enough. More than enough.
I stayed longer, chatting with one of the apprentices — Google Translate doing the heavy lifting. He told me about life as an apprentice: the early mornings, the discipline, the years of commitment it takes to earn a place in a garden like this. Hard work and deep purpose. At some point we stopped talking and just watered some of the trees together. Famous trees. Trees I had read about. And there I was, holding the hose.
Kimura’s effect runs deeper than the trees themselves — into how people think about line, about drama, about pushing past what they thought was possible. Standing in his garden, I understood that in a new way. His Shimpaku junipers are his most famous and award-winning species , and seeing them in person — the deadwood, the impossible movement, the sheer sculptural force of them — is nothing like a photograph. And the pine forests. Simply beautiful. Quietly monumental.
Six months into this hobby, I stood in the garden of the man who redefined it. I arrived as a pilgrim and left as something more — not a master, not even close, but someone who has now seen with his own eyes what this art can become.
The road continues. More gardens, more teachers, more trees.
It started, as so many pilgrimages do, with a red-eye flight and a city still half-asleep. After a hectic week of business in Australia, I boarded a night flight to Tokyo — a deliberate choice, refusing to lose a single day of what was a dream for quite some time. I landed in the early morning, dropped my bags at the hotel in Ginza, and within the hour I was on a train heading north. Destination: Omiya. A Village Born from Catastrophe
The train ride gave me time to think about where I was going. Omiya Bonsai Village — or Ōmiya Bonsaimura — is not a theme park or a curated attraction. It is a living neighbourhood, born from disaster and shaped by a century of devotion.
Omiya is a city in Saitama Prefecture, located 30 kilometres north of Tokyo. A collective of Tokyo’s foremost bonsai artisans identified the area as the perfect location for a village-like community of bonsai gardens. Environmental conditions were favourable — cleaner air, better-quality groundwater, and soil enriched by ancient eruptions of Mt. Fuji, giving it a low mineral content ideal for growing miniaturised trees.
Following the widespread fires and destruction of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, bonsai artisans were even more determined to leave the capital, and in 1925 Omiya Bonsai Village was established where it remains today. Previously underutilised land became a thriving hub of bonsai cultivation, home to as many as 35 nurseries in the years leading up to World War II. In 1942 the local government officially named the district Bonsaicho — literally, “Bonsai Town.”
The founding residents even set special rules for the village: each household had to own at least ten bonsai trees, keep their garden open to the public, and avoid building any two-storey house that might cast shade on a neighbour’s trees. There is something quietly radical about a community organised around the protection of plants.
Today the village’s name is known all over the world, drawing foreign visitors and bonsai enthusiasts who come seeking training, knowledge, and a glimpse of living masterpieces. The first World Bonsai Convention was held here in 1989, attracting visitors from 32 countries, and returned again in 2017 — cementing Omiya’s place as the spiritual home of bonsai culture.
The Museum — A World First
My first stop was the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum — the world’s first museum solely devoted to bonsai, with a collection of over 120 masterpieces alongside woodblock prints and historic artworks centred on bonsai culture.
What makes it unlike any other museum is this: the works are never finished. As they grow, they change. Every tree on display is a work in progress — and visitors can learn how each one is shaped and pruned over the course of its living life.
Mind-blowing. All the trees are hundreds of years old. Some over a thousand. Standing in front of them, you feel the weight of time differently.
I walked slowly through the exhibition, trying to take it all in. The oldest specimens have been alive longer than most nations. They were saplings when medieval Europe was rebuilding from the plague. They have outlasted dynasties, wars, earthquakes — and through all of it, they have been tended, shaped, and cared for by generations of hands. It is a profoundly humbling thing to stand in front of.
The Six Nurseries
There are six bonsai gardens in Omiya Bonsai Village, each shaped by the personality and aesthetic taste of its owner. Time allowed me to visit three — Mansei-en, Fuyo-en, and Toju-en — which I had been told were among the most compelling.
All three were extraordinary — beyond anything I could have imagined before arriving. The most beautiful trees I have ever seen, displayed with the quiet confidence that comes from centuries of refinement. No spotlights, no dramatic staging. Just trees on benches, in silence, speaking for themselves.
I’ll be honest: I felt something complicated walking through those gardens. Pure awe, yes — but also a particular sadness that comes from loving something you cannot have. In Israel, trees of this age and calibre simply don’t exist in bonsai form. Import restrictions make acquiring them impossible. You look at a six-hundred-year-old juniper and you understand, viscerally, that this is something that cannot be rushed or replicated. It must be grown, across generations, by people who accept they will never see it finished.
That thought is both humbling and, strangely, liberating. It clarifies what the practice is really about.
(Photography was not permitted in any of the three nurseries — privacy and protection — so these impressions live only in memory.)
A Conversation with Sam
At the last garden, I got talking with an apprentice — a young man named Sam, from the UK. He had been there six years. We stood in the late afternoon light while he told me about the life.
Six days a week. Often seven. Early mornings and late evenings. The kind of commitment that closes off most other paths — but he spoke about it without complaint, with something closer to quiet satisfaction.
What struck me most was the structure of learning:
Year 1 — Chores. No trees. Cleaning, sweeping, carrying. Learning the rhythms of the garden, the hierarchy, the silence. The apprentice earns trust before earning access.
Year 2 — First contact. Allowed to touch the trees, but only for the most basic maintenance tasks. Observation remains the primary mode of learning.
Year 3 — The art of water. Only in the third year are apprentices taught how to water. This surprised me most. It is explained simply: watering is everything. Too much and the tree grows weakly; too little and development stalls. The water is the message you send the tree about what you want it to become. It takes a full year just to learn to read and respond correctly.
Years 4–6 — Development and art. Only now does the formal teaching of bonsai shaping begin — wiring, timing, aesthetic intention. Everything before this was preparation.
I thought about that for a long time on the train back to Tokyo. We live in an age obsessed with shortcuts and acceleration. And here, in this quiet corner of Saitama, people are voluntarily choosing the opposite — building their lives around the slowest possible version of mastery.
A Final Thought
Before leaving I had one more thought — and I’ll admit it made me smile. Sam’s path demands you start young. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe bonsai, precisely because it cannot be rushed, is the perfect discipline for someone who comes to it as a passion rather than a vocation. You are freed from the pressure of mastery. You can simply grow alongside the trees.
I left Omiya just as the afternoon light was going golden. Already my mind was full of what was coming next — Shizuoka, the kilns, the workshops ahead. But for a few hours on that train back through the Saitama suburbs, I let myself just sit with what I’d seen. A thousand-year-old tree in a pot. The hands that shaped it. The hands that will shape it next.
I’m Ram, and I’ve been connected to nature and gardening my whole life. But bonsai? That only started six months ago — and it immediately became my passion.
For many years I’ve worked in the IT and cybersecurity industry, a demanding world that runs fast and rarely stops. Bonsai hit me like the opposite of all that. The connection to nature, the combination of knowledge, technique, and art — that winning formula pulled me in completely and hasn’t let go since.
In six months I’ve built a collection of over 50 trees, mostly species that thrive in the Israeli climate: olives, elms, junipers, pines, and more. Each one is a small project, a small relationship, a small lesson.
My other great passion is travel. I’m fortunate that my work takes me around the world regularly, and wherever I land, I try to carve out time to explore the local bonsai scene — visiting gardens, meeting collectors, discovering artists and craftspeople who are part of this remarkable global community. Belgium, the Netherlands, France, San Francisco, LA, Florida, and now Japan. The world turns out to be full of bonsai people, and they are some of the most generous and interesting people I’ve ever met.
I’m also incredibly lucky to have found a great teacher. Shai Cohen is a living encyclopedia of bonsai and botanical knowledge, and I feel genuinely fortunate to have him mentor me on this journey.
This blog is where I’ll share it all — what I’m learning about the craft, the trees I’m working on, and the bonsai-related adventures that happen along the way.
If any of this speaks to you, subscribe and come along for the ride. This journey is just beginning.
