If you’re not careful, one of these little trees could become your next obsession

A little tree caught Harold Johnson Jr.’s attention in the early ’90s and has held it since.

“My wife and I have been engaged in bonsai for 24 years. We came across a little plant down in Charleston, South Carolina, came home and killed it,” he explains. “We’ve done everything we can since then to learn more.”

Indeed, he’s done more than learn how not to kill bonsai. In those 24 years, Johnson has amassed a library of maybe 130 bonsai books and a collection of journals going back to the 1960s. He’s learned from two experienced mentors and has taken classes. Today Johnson has moved into a teaching role, giving classes and workshops at JC Raulston Arboretum, the North Carolina Botanical Garden and various local nurseries and garden clubs. He’s vice president of the North Carolina Bonsai Society, too, which holds a free expo this weekend at Sarah P. Duke Gardens in Durham.

“Part of my job has been the missionary, to help as many people be introduced to bonsai as possible,” Johnson says.

Indeed, his and the Society’s work puts these little plants in front of North Carolinians. At the North Carolina State Fair, for example, the Society annually displays about 30 trees. At this weekend’s expo, there will be bonsai on display, sure, but also four demonstrations where bonsai techniques are applied to nursery-bought trees. They’re hour-long crash courses, he says, but they should give a taste of what goes into trees-in-miniature.

The art of bonsai

The first lesson, Johnson points out, is pronunciation (which this interviewer botched). It’s bone-sai, he says, not banzai. The first word means the art of making little trees. The second word is a kamikaze’s death cry, which means, “may my soul live for 10,000 years.”

Beyond that, the horticultural challenge of bonsai is keeping something alive, even while pushing the limits in terms of container size and pruning. Ultimately, says Johnson, you’re trying to make a little plant look like something you’d see in an actual landscape.

“When you see the big roots showing on the surface of the soil, that reminds us about those big oak trees in Raleigh that are pushing up streets and sidewalks,” says Johnson. “We know those aren’t new trees, because it took time to develop those.”

Small details

Some of these plants are less than a foot tall, yet look like gnarled, weathered, full-grown trees. There’s more to creating this illusion than just keeping your bonsai little. It needs treelike properties, too. It needs adult-looking bark (as opposed to seedlings’ smooth bark). Using bonsai techniques, you can encourage your plant to grow leaves at half the size they occur grow in the wild, shrinking four-inch leaves down to two. Trees are thick at the base and thin at the top, too, which can be imitated.

“Another we trick we use, we know that when we look at a shrub it’s just a bunch of dense green, but when we look at a tree out here, we look at a trunk, we see where the branches are leaving the trunk,” says Johnson. “If we can take a shrub and we could prune it so you get to see a trunk, you get to see where the branches are growing from the trunk.”

Making your bonsai look older than it really is can mean simulating the rough lives real trees lead. A bonsai may have dead spots on it, simulating lightning strikes or ice storm damage. If you know how plants respond to stimulus, Johnson says, you can get your desired result.

“People always walk up and say, ‘how old is that bonsai?’ ” he says. “Here’s how you have to answer it: first, how does it look?”

Little local plants

“The reason so many bonsai in the U.S. that are on display are Japanese and Chinese plants is because we are simply copying what they used, and they were using their native plants,” says Johnson.

There are some perfectly good short-needle pines in North Carolina, he notes, of which several respond admirably to bonsai cultivation.

Indeed, natives like persimmon, oak, Virginia juniper and bald cypress take to bonsai. It can be trial and error, Johnson admits, and not every plant takes to bonsai culture. Redbuds and native dogwood don’t (though there is a Japanese dogwood that will).

“In Asheville, at the North Carolina Arboretum, there is a tremendous collection of bonsai there,” says Johnson. Many of the plants in this display garden are endemic to the Southeast. “There are some wonderful creations in Asheville that are total natives. Maybe it looks like a mountain forest that combines two or three species of plants, but they’re all native.”

Inspiration from nature

The end-goal of all this hands-on technique is to make a miniature of a tree that might exist in a forest somewhere, so don’t forget to look to actual trees for inspiration. Johnson recommends trees that have been sculpted by stress and extreme weather, suggesting the gnarled maritime forest around Fort Fisher or windblown, weathered trees atop Grandfather Mountain or Mount Mitchell as examples. The bald cypresses on Lake Waccamaw, too, he recommends as fascinating natural examples that can be recreated in miniature.

“Nothing will be more educational when you begin in bonsai than looking at the trees in nature,” Johnson says.

This story was originally published July 6, 2017 at 3:19 PM with the headline "If you’re not careful, one of these little trees could become your next obsession."