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In a Los Altos backyard, there is a redwood tree with a black, hollowed out trunk and bright green growths extending up. But this isn’t your average sky-scraping redwood: It’s a 1- to 2-foot-tall bonsai whose trunk has been meticulously carved out and stained to resemble a burn scar.
“The way to think about this is it’s sculpture in a living medium,” said Michael Greenstein, president of Kusamura’s Bonsai Club in Palo Alto, about this redwood bonsai he’s created.
The tree is one of several up for sale at the club’s 65th annual show April 26-27. The free event, which drew around 400 attendees last year, is a bonsai bonanza featuring over 75 trees on view in a group show and demos of bonsai training techniques, like wiring branches and pruning leaves.
“Bonsai is all about messing with your mind,” said Greenstein, who owns and works on at least 150 bonsai trees. “So the idea is to give you this feeling of a mature tree in miniature scale.”
To train a tree to look older than it is, bonsai artists encourage the development of small and numerous branches and leaves on their plants. Bark is thickened over years and roots are exposed. Wind and the debris it carries also shape the tree, and the resulting deadwood is often left untouched.
“Mother Nature is the best sculptor, much better than the carving of hands of men,” said Greenstein, pointing to deadwood on one of his California junipers. The way it splits off from the base and snakes around the branches ages the approximately 50-year-old tree significantly.
To teach these techniques to club members, Kusamura offers hands-on workshops year-round to both beginner and experienced bonsai artists. Since its founding in the Bay Area in the 1950s, Kusamura has aimed to provide readily available education on the practice of bonsai. Members also have access to a library of classic books on the subject. And today, it only costs $45 per year for a club membership. Rising or established bonsai masters are on occasion brought in to teach classes at an additional cost.
There are around 50 active members in the club from all over the Peninsula. Members also lean on one another to help care for each other’s trees when traveling or ill. Greenstein is currently boarding and maintaining a number of plants belonging to a club member for at least half a year.
The club also helps older members or families of deceased bonsai owners dwindle down their collections. Plants that the family can easily care for stay put, while the valuable ones or those that are more work to maintain are sold or donated.
For the past 15 years, club members have also volunteered to maintain and care for Filoli’s bonsai collection. They transplant, trim, wire and prune the trees weekly. The collection will be on display throughout the month of May at the estate.
The origins of bonsai can be traced back to the 2,000-year-old Chinese art of penjing — the practice of creating miniature landscapes in pots. Various trees, plants, rocks and sometimes even water are used together to create the scenes. In contrast, the Japanese art of bonsai that developed much later focuses primarily on individual or small groupings of trees.
A set of principles guides artists in how trees are to be prepared and shown. According to Greenstein, styles like formal upright, informal upright, slanting and cascading all have rules on branch placement and pot shape and color.
“I teach students that you should learn those rules,” he said. “And then you can decide when you want to break them.” One way to do so is by working with trees that may not typically be considered for the art form.
Greenstein, who’s been practicing bonsai since the late 1960s, has over 30 tree varieties in his collection, including rosemary, coast live oaks, blueberry, bougainvillea and elephant bush.
When asked if he’s found something that can’t be bonsai, he said, “I’m not sure – I haven’t figured that out yet.”
He also trains classic plants like junipers and Japanese black and white pines. Greenstein added that he thinks California bonsai artists should bring a redwood and an oak into their collection to honor the state’s heritage.
“Every tree has a story, right?” Greenstein said. “And that’s part of what makes it magical.”
He has redwoods that were originally collected by a friend from the CZU Fire zone. He fished his blue oak out of a compost bin at SummerWinds Nursery in Palo Alto after an employee alerted him about a discarded plant with interesting roots. To honor his late first wife who died of breast cancer, he grows yew varieties. Taxol, a prominent chemotherapy drug, is derived from the bark of western yew. And he’s grown a cork oak from a 2-year-old seedling that Toshio “Tosh” Saburomaru, one of Kusamura’s founding members, gave him.
Older trees are also passed down through multiple artists over decades. Greenstein owns an approximately 200-year-old California juniper he inherited from previous club president John Planting. Greenstein plans on passing it down to someone else in the club in the future.
“I think it ties back into that very often, in my opinion, art tells a story, and bonsai can tell a very dramatic story of resilience and of survival against all odds,” he said.
The Kusamura Bonsai Club’s 65th annual show is Saturday, April 26, from noon to 4 p.m. and Sunday, April 27, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Addison School, 1045 Webster St., Palo Alto. Admission is free. Club members typically meet on the third Friday of the month from 7-9:30 p.m. in the Parish Hall at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 600 Colorado Ave., Palo Alto. Guests are always welcome. (There will be no May meeting.) For more information, visit kusamurabonsai.org.
Filoli will host the Kusamura Bonsai Club from 10 a..m. to 4 p.m. May 18 as part of its monthlong bonsai exhibit in May. For more information and tickets, visit filoli.org/bonsai.
