Image courtesy The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Join The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino at 10 a.m. Saturday, Feb 27, for a free virtual event filled with everything there is to love about bonsai trees.
Virtual Bonsai-A-Thon, presented by the Golden State Bonsai Federation, will have Ted Matson, curator of the bonsai collection at The Huntington, hosting video tours of the bonsai courts, the Ben Oki Bonsai Nursery, and the “Lifelines/Timelines” bonsai exhibition at the Gardens.
In the afternoon, Phillip E. Bloom, the June and Simon K.C. Li Curator of the Chinese Garden and director The Huntington’s of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies, will introduce the Garden’s brand new “penjing” court and then discuss the history of this art form.
Both sessions include time for questions from the audience.
The term “bonsai” describes the Japanese art form which uses cultivation techniques to produce small trees in containers that imitate the look, shape and scale of full-sized trees. The art is believed to have actually originated from the Chinese tradition called “penzai,” or “penjing,” with similar practices existing in other cultures, such as the miniature living landscapes of Vietnamese “Hòn Non Bộ.”
Japanese bonsai is said to have been in existence for more than 1,000 years, but ancient Chinese art recently discovered shows penzai or penjing may have been in practice in China since about 3000 to 5000 BC.
Buddhist monks from China were said to have introduced miniature trees to Japan sometime around the 13th century. The art form became highly formalized there, reaching its peak in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the Paris World Expo in 1900, bonsai gained worldwide exposure and fashionable acclaim.
Often, bonsai is confused with dwarfing, but the main difference is that while dwarfing involves more scientific research to create plants that are genetic miniatures of existing species, bonsai uses primarily cultivation techniques that are centuries old – pruning, potting, root reduction, grafting, defoliation – to produce small trees that look like full-grown trees.
Saturday’s online event is free to join and will be on Zoom.
To reserve your spot, visit www.huntington.org/
