Trop picks: Bonsai
This is the week when everyone’s in Paris, clucking about carbon emissions while generating a huge carbon footprint.
And so, in the spirit of contradiction and not conservation, the star of this week’s Tropicalist is the bonsai tree: not a particular specimen of plant but a particular approach to horticulture.
Bonsai is man’s ultimate homage to nature. It is our humble attempt to recreate, in the intimacy of our homes, the beauty of the wilderness, of that wind-worn tree on a rocky outcrop or of the proud pine soaring tall above a remote monastery.
The formal criteria for classical bonsai like the black pine are so strict that the expert is lucky if he achieves a single good bonsai in his lifetime: perfectly artificial nature, in other words.
Unlike eugenics, bonsai artists show an appreciation for the grotesque, but it’s a perfect sort of grotesque, a platonic ideal of grotesqueness.
Good bonsai requires good technique. It takes a real understanding of botany, and a high level of empathy with an individual plant, to predict how it will react to external stimuli.
Plants, being modular, can vary quite wildly in size even within the same species.
It’s because of this modularity that, with the right combination of stressors, you can create a fifteen-centimeter replica of a tree that might grow to fifteen meters in the wild.
To achieve the bonsai effect, the root of a plant is constrained in a small pot, where it is subsequently subject to extreme pruning from time to time.
Thus restricted in its ability to absorb water and minerals, the root communicates its distress to the command center of the plant, the meristem.
The meristem, an organ that sits hidden deep within the packed layers of expanding leaves in the growing plant shoot, is invisible to the naked human eye. It is here that the critical decisions are made that will determine the final size and shape of the leaves and stems of each individual plant.
In response to external stressors, the meristem shrinks the size of one of the plant’s modular building blocks: its leaves. Simultaneously, the meristem actually conserves or increases the size of the plant’s other modular building blocks: the leaf cells, although it produces far fewer of them.
To quote the biologist Robert E. Cook:
“How all of this is coordinated, and how such coordination reaches from the deepest root tips to the tallest growing shoots on the tree, is unknown. But it is remarkable that, despite the harsh treatment we humans sometimes impose on bonsai, such coordination survives this mutilation intact, leading to the elegantly miniaturized leaves so essential to the beauty of these plants.”
Bonsai is an old art, over a thousand years at the least. Although we often like to imagine a pre-modern Eden where we lived in Zen-like harmony with nature, it’s clear we have long had a complicated relationship with the natural world.