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.

Massachusetts, July 2026

After three posts walking you through California back in April, let’s jump forward to the present. Last week I was in Boston for company meetings – and yes, I’m on the road that much. I’m not complaining. A nomad who gets to keep landing in beautiful corners of the world and grumbles about it has misunderstood his own good fortune.

As always, I tried to carve out a window for the local bonsai scene. This time the window was narrow: a couple of hours on my last day, nothing more. So I picked one place and drove out to it – Bonsai West, in Littleton, about forty minutes northwest of Boston.

The place

Bonsai West is one of those American bonsai institutions that has been quietly building for longer than most of us have been paying attention. Michael Levin founded it in 1982 – he started out growing junipers and pines in a small greenhouse behind his house in Brookline and selling them out of the back of a VW, sometimes just setting up on the sidewalk in Harvard Square. This was the moment when Americans were first getting curious about bonsai, and he was standing right at the front of it.

From Brookline to Somerville and finally to Littleton, the operation grew into what it is now: two acres of old New England farmland with a 250-year-old farmhouse looking over the outdoor garden, five greenhouses, a pottery house, teaching and demonstration space, and a collection the nursery describes as one of the largest groups of historically important specimen bonsai outside Japan.

That last line isn’t just marketing. Part of what makes the collection what it is came from Levin’s trips to California in the 1980s, where he bought from the first generation of Japanese-American growers – men who were already old-timers at the time. There are trees on that property he has now had for thirty-five years, which means some of them have been in his care longer than they were in anyone else’s. He has said, more or less, that back then he couldn’t understand how an old grower could bring himself to sell a tree he’d raised for thirty years. Now that thirty years have passed for him too, he understands.

Practically speaking: the garden and greenhouses hold a mix — a static collection that belongs to the nursery, and trees that are for sale, ranging from century-old specimens down to raw pre-bonsai stock. Full inventory of pots, tools, soils, books. A school with classes from a three-hour introduction all the way up to advanced work.

The visit

Here’s the honest version, because I’d rather write an honest short post than a padded long one: this was a quiet visit. Michael wasn’t there. Nobody gave me a tour, I didn’t get the stories behind the trees, and I didn’t come away with a notebook full of technique.

What I did was walk. Slowly, twice around, the way you do when you know the clock is running. The garden is genuinely beautiful – laid out in a Japanese style, trees given room to be looked at rather than crammed onto benches to move product. Good material. Good pots. The kind of place where the standard of the pre-bonsai stock tells you as much about the operation as the specimen trees do.

And that was it. Sometimes a visit is a full chapter and sometimes it’s a paragraph. This one was a paragraph, and I still left with my eyes recalibrated, which is most of what I go for anyway.

Grateful, and coming back

I keep being handed these opportunities, and I don’t take them for granted. Not every stop is a revelation – this one wasn’t, and I’m fine saying so. But every place teaches something, even if it’s only a way of laying out a garden, or the sight of one tree that shows you what patience actually looks like when it’s been applied for thirty-five years.

The good news: I’m heading back to that part of the world in about a month, this time for a personal vacation with proper time on the clock. No meeting to run to, no two-hour window. I intend to go back and see the region properly – Bonsai gardens, and whatever else New England has been hiding from me.

More soon.

— BonsaiNomad

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.

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.

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.