The Bonsai Store

I'd always thought that bonsai trees were hereditary dwarfs -- botany's answer to Chihuahuas and toy poodles -- grown in shallow little trays because cute plants look best in cute containers. That was before I visited The Bonsai Store, at 3804 Wilmington Ave. in St. Matthews, and stumbled upon a minor revelation.

There, in an attached greenhouse that houses a wondrous assortment of Lilliputian specimens, an eight-inch-tall Bahama black olive tree (becidus spinoza) caught my eye -- not because of its bantam size, but because it conjured up the craggy, windswept, centuries-old olive trees that lent movement and power to Monet paintings of Mediterranean hillsides. In the span of a few seconds I'd inadvertently discovered the ironic nature of bonsai growing: It's not about daintiness at all. It's about cultivating the giant trees of your imagination; it's about capturing the illusion of enormity, augustness, distance.

"That Bahama black olive, in the wild, would get to be 30 or 40 feet tall," says The Bonsai Store's owner, Larry Cassidy, a 78-year-old former insurance representative who's been infatuated with "the art of growing a tree in a pot" (bon means pot, sai means tree) for 25 years. Another tree in his store, a two-foot-tall African jade (portulucaria afra), reaches 60 feet in the wild.

So how do you keep these decidedly undiminutive growers small while nurturing their natural immensity? Ah, that's where the pot comes in, says Cassidy. The tree must be, in a word, "trained." The shallowness of a bonsai pot (which employs fired-clay pebbles in place of soil) crowds the roots, stunting the tree's vertical growth and leaf size. The breadth of the pot -- more aptly called a tray -- facilitates horizontal branch growth and a thicker trunk. With a little weekly pruning and some strategic (temporary) wiring, the miniature tree can be trained to resemble the behemoths of the windswept wilderness.

"It's a natural for plastic surgeons," says Cassidy. "You know, the wiring, the trimming."

Exposed roots are a plus to the bonsai gardener, he says; they add dramatic majesty to the tree (see the zelkova elm pictured below), as does training the roots to grow over and around a well-placed "boulder." Another plus is the windswept look, accomplished by root- and branch-pruning, and yet another is a twisted, gnarled trunk.

An interesting note: Two plants normally grown around here as bushes -- azaleas and boxwoods -- make amazingly handsome bonsai specimens. As shrubs in someone's yard they're no big deal. As single-trunk bonsai trees they're stunners -- especially the Kingsville boxwood (of White House fame, left photo), whose foliage clusters look as tidy as the florets on a head of broccoli.

Another interesting note: Although the leaves of a bonsai tree can be "shrunk," the flowers or fruit cannot. Cassidy has a 20-inch-tall ponderosa lemon tree that features a lemon the size of a navel orange.

 by Jack Welch

Louisville.com

Louisville Magazine/Web Edition

November, 1997