Bonsai Nomad

Tag: travel

  • Small World, Small Trees: Longwood with Ofer

    Small World, Small Trees: Longwood with Ofer


    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 1975
    Black Pine, in training since 1984
    Juniper, 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.

  • A Quiet Morning Among Giants: The Huntington Gardens

    A Quiet Morning Among Giants: The Huntington Gardens

    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.

  • Back to California: Bonsai Between Conferences

    Back to California: Bonsai Between Conferences

    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.

  • A Quiet Detour to Kew: Bonsai Between Meetings

    A Quiet Detour to Kew: Bonsai Between Meetings

    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.

  • Epilogue: The Gyouzan — My Travel Companion

    Epilogue: The Gyouzan — My Travel Companion

    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.

  • Saturday with Jeff: When Plan B Beats Plan A

    Saturday with Jeff: When Plan B Beats Plan A

    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.

  • Japan Bonsai Pilgrimage, Part 3: Bjorn!!!

    Japan Bonsai Pilgrimage, Part 3: Bjorn!!!

    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!

    BonsaiNomad

  • Daitoku-ji’s Hōshun-in – A Garden Just For Me

    Daitoku-ji’s Hōshun-in – A Garden Just For 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.

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