Bonsai Club

Greenhouse Garden Center, Carson City

First Saturday of each month, March to October, 11AM-12PM

by Bill Macauley

I’m not sure if this is unusual, but I first went to Bonsai Club because I had bought a bonsai tree –a Fukien Tea tree—out of the back of a truck, and it was dying. I have no green thumb, and my wife was reluctant to advise or act with a bonsai tree. Between us, we weren’t entirely sure what bonsai meant except a small plant in a pot. Desperate to save our tree, Debi found the Carson City Bonsai Club online, and she suggested I go. The rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately, so is my Fukien Tea tree.

But, going to Bonsai Club started something for me, as I think it does for many. Ken Jones, who has been leading the Bonsai Club for about eight years, is an engaging teacher with lots of knowledge and stories to share. The discussions and lectures are really fun. The activities in our meetings have been, too.

The usual pattern for our meetings is a talk at the beginning, Ken sharing with us some of his knowledge and experience from over 60 years of working with bonsai. I learn something useful every time. The hands-on work is just as good. I get to see decisions made, how they are made, and watch while folks make what seem brave choices (to someone like me who is excited just to keep a plant alive), all with the guidance and insights Ken shares so generously. And the other club members are so generous and informative, too, many because of years of bonsai and others through more immediate and varied experiences, too. It feels like a generous and knowledgeable community, all focused on helping each and every participant get the support and insights they need to succeed with their own bonsai. There’s a generosity there I haven’t experienced elsewhere. And we get to be outdoors together, too, among the nursery’s beautiful plants and accessories.

I had a chance to sit down with Ken a while back, to discuss the club. It was not off the cuff for him; this club is built on decades of experience with not only bonsai but bonsai clubs, too. Ken’s first encounter with a bonsai club was back in the early 1960s, when he was just a kid. That club nurtured and guided his burgeoning interest in bonsai, gave him the support and information he needed to really get into it. There, he met with world-renowned bonsai expert John Naka (For more information on Mr. Naka, visit https://www.bonsai-nbf.org/naka.). This was also the beginning of what would become the respected California Bonsai Society (https://www.californiabonsaisociety.com/). Ken first met Shigeru Nagatashi there, the master who would become Ken’s bonsai mentor (For more on Mr. Nagatashi and his son Roy, also a bonsai master, visit the website for their Fuji Bonsai Nursery: https://fujibonsainursery.com/.). Ken worked with other bonsai clubs over the years, too, such as the Santa Anita Bonsai Society (https://sabonsai.org/), Foothills Bonsai, and Descanso Bonsai Society (https://www.facebook.com/descansobonsai/). Ken has seen a lot of bonsai clubs over the years. As Ken and I talked more, it became clear that there were through lines from these experiences what built in our current Bonsai Club.

Ken started with bonsai when he was about 10 and, by the time Ken was in college, he was teaching bonsai. Those experiences and interests come through so clearly in our club meetings. Ken knows how to bring together traditional bonsai and Japanese cultural traditions to explain and inform what club members might do with their trees and shrubs now, balanced with inviting participants to make their own choices, explore their options. And he is really gifted in making it all accessible to even the most inexperienced club members (Like me!).

Bonsai has never been absent from Ken’s life, as far as I can tell, and, as he grew into adulthood, it grew along with his passions for climbing, camping, hiking, and gardening. He is a man of nature. I don’t think I have been to a single meeting of the Bonsai Club in Carson where Ken didn’t tell us about a beautiful tree, somewhere ‘far from the madding crowd’ that has inspired him and his bonsai. Ken told me, “My teachers are not people. My teachers were mountain ranges.” Ken is quick to add that the Sierra Nevada and San Gabriel Mountains have influenced him most. The natural world he has known is inherent in his bonsai sensibilities, too, in his rich understanding and discussion of bonsai, in his eye for beauty and the work of making bonsai with that beauty in mind, many times modeled on distinct tress he has seen in the nether reaches of those same mountain ranges and others. Ken knows that he has such a wealth of experience and knowledge to share, and that we want to learn from him. He knows that most of us will never see what he has seen, but he encourages us to seek out wonders in nature every time we meet. He tells us a lot. Teaches us generously. But, in every meeting of the Bonsai Club, it is never long before we are working directly with the plants and trees that he and others bring in each month. Nature, the trees and plants themselves, teach us, and Ken is there to help us be ready to learn.

As our conversation continued, Ken and I talked about the relationships between refinement and imperfection, specifically whether wabi-sabi can be part of bonsai. Ken says bonsai can incorporate both refinement and imperfection which, for a beginner like me, is particularly good news. There are many potential balances in bonsai, Ken tells me: refinement and imperfection, tradition and inspiration, east and west, desert and mountain. Like Whitman, bonsai “contains multitudes.” We wondered at the ways our paths have wound through time in such different ways, and yet we both ended up at Bonsai Club in Carson. I think Ken would agree that’s one of the strengths of our club, too; the varieties of people, plants, ideas, paths. That may be one of the things I like best about our Bonsai Club; there’s room for everyone no matter how they get there or when.

In the end, we settled on the idea that Bonsai Club is about community, with one another and nature. It’s about our relationships with our ‘little trees’ and, for as complicated as our lives can seem, Ken says, “Bonsai doesn’t care . . . The little tree doesn’t care about your financial situation. It doesn’t care about your status . . . The little tree is either happy or it’s not.” We share in that together, our Bonsai Club.