American Bonsai at the NC Arboretum

Hi Arthur,
It was very nice to meet you and Rodney at the PBA show in early May in DC.  Here are a few pics, if I can get the system to work for me.  

I had the pleasure of taking part in a BYOT workshop that you held.  I was next to this man, Clinton Scott, who employed the torch to a dead branch in an attempt to bend it.  I believe you are one of the tree holders in this image.

I attended the event all 3 days taking several workshops and listening to a couple of lectures as well.  I am glad to have made your acquaintance, and sorry you were not able to see Janet during your visit.

Arthur Joura wrote:
Autumn, like spring, is a transitional season, a bridge between the two other, more substantial seasons, and all four together make up a full rotation around the sun in the temperate places on earth. The two transitional seasons spend a fair amount of their allotted time mimicking the seasons that precede and follow them, so that the beginning of autumn feels very much like summer and the last part of autumn can be as bitter as winter. In our idealized vision of "Autumn", the deciduous trees are ablaze in the glories of that spectrum of the rainbow that covers everything from the coolest of yellows to the warmest of reds, and the air is a pleasing combination of the best attributes of both warm and cool. Yet the bulk of the time in that particular season is otherwise. The brightest colors show themselves for only a few weeks before continuing inexorably to the dullness of decay, and the mildest of days occupy only a short path between an expanse of heat on one side and an expanse of cold on the other. It is the ephemeral nature of autumn and spring that endears them to those of us who experience them. They come, and then before you know it, they are gone.

At the end of spring, a person looks ahead to the promise of a long season of growth and life.

At the end of autumn, there is not so much to which we look forward as there is that which we look back upon.

As such, a person in autumn is well served to remember that life is cyclical, and is forever going around!

well, i am only half way through page 8 of this blog/thread and just wanted to say that i really appreciate this piece of rumination,
as it reflects some collections of words that i have strung together in the past.

there is much more of your writing that resonates deep within me and i thank you for putting it out there for everyone...
(whether they agree or not   )

thanks again,
kevin

Dan W. wrote: I think we should all just take a break from the "bonsai" term discussion and play a game of "football"... .

i think this one might have slipped by most folks as i didnt see any immediate comments on it
(at least thru page 11 where i left off today)...

but i think it deserves recognition as pretty damn clever in context of the discussion  

Thank you to all those who have taken the time to leave their comments!

Vance - You are welcome. Yes, Pinus mugo is excellent material for bonsai, and anyone who says otherwise either does not know what they are talking about, is prejudiced for some reason, or lives somewhere too warm for the species to grow well.

Doug - I always appreciate your very sincere and supportive words. Thank you for being a loyal reader!

Lordy - It was good to meet you in DC, although I do not think I made the connection that you were who you are on this forum. Thank you for taking the workshop, and for posting the pictures from the Potomac Bonsai Spring Festival.

Kevin - Somehow I just knew you were the Beer City Snake when we met in Milwaukee, and I am sorry that I blew your cover! I appreciate you going back and reading through all my previous posts. Here is another:

Traveling to various places and making bonsai presentations is not the least agreeable part of my job. In fact, I enjoy it quite a bit. One negative aspect of it, however, is that it takes time away from maintaining the plants and garden, and this issue can be exacerbated by the fact that much of the demand for programs is focused on spring and the early part of the growing season, when the demands of plants and garden are greatest. It becomes a balancing act, and time gets squeezed in all areas, and some other concerns get shortchanged. So it has been lately with my attention to this thread. I had several public speaking opportunities arise this spring in which I wanted to partake, and in the effort to do that while still keeping up with my bonsai responsibilities my commitment to participating in this forum took a back seat. But I have no intention of letting it go entirely. In all the places I have been to lately I have had the pleasure of meeting people who read and post on the IBC, and this has been an affirmation to me of the value in being part of this online bonsai community.

That word - community - is worth considering. It has several definitions, but the one applicable in this case is this: "A social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists." I think of all the people who enjoy doing bonsai as being part of the bonsai community. That larger group of people can then be broken into smaller groups, each a kind of community of its own. In this sense clubs are a kind of community, as is the IBC, an online bonsai community to which all of you reading this at least peripherally belong.

Most recently I was in the state of Wisconsin, to spend some time doing programs for the Milwaukee Bonsai Society (MBS). These people made an impression on me as being a vibrant and well-organized community of bonsai enthusiasts. Their membership numbers somewhere in the vicinity of 150 people, and while I am aware that there are other bonsai organizations that feature memberships greater than that, 150 members is significantly more than most bonsai clubs can muster. Of course, Milwaukee is a big town, the 30th most populous city in the United States with around 600,000 residents, and that certainly helps. But I can think of other large population centers where there are much smaller clubs or no clubs at all. Beyond the numbers, the MBS is an active group with a lot going on. They are a member of the Mid America Bonsai Alliance, an association of bonsai organizations from a 9-state region, plus Ontario, Canada. Within MBS there are numerous independent study groups, each with its own teacher. The club brings in multiple nationally known bonsai professionals every year, to provide workshops and demonstrations as well as private consultation to study groups and individual members. The club has a kind of instructional course that shepherds members from the novice level, through the intermediate and up to the advanced level. They have outreach programs that engage the general public in an active effort to bring new people into the bonsai pastime. In a rather unique kind of outreach venture, one of the MBS members, a teacher at a local middle school, has organized the Mahone Bonsai Club which consists entirely of students from the school. MBS has existed for more than 40 years and has monthly meetings at the Boerner Botanical Gardens, part of the excellent Milwaukee County Parks system. They have an annual show there, as well, and recently began having a winter silhouette show, which was held last year at the Lynden Sculpture Gardens. Right now, there is a dedicated effort underway to have a permanent public bonsai collection in Milwaukee and both the Boerner and Lynden gardens are possible sites for display to be located. As I said, this is a vibrant, well-organized community of bonsai enthusiasts!

Being in Milwaukee and seeing what the bonsai folks there are doing caused me to reflect on how it comes to be that some clubs, organizations and communities flourish so dramatically while others are stagnant, or chronically weak and just barely hanging on. The answer, it seems to me, comes down to the people involved, how involved they are, and how they are involved.

During my stay in Milwaukee I was hosted by a wonderfully gracious couple - Steve and Linda Contney. Linda is the MBS librarian and Steve is a board member and past president. Here is a picture of Steve, posed in front of a wall hanging at the Lynden Sculpture Garden (I thought the backdrop went well with his shirt!):



Steve is one of those people that every club should be fortunate enough to have among its membership. Retired now from his career in medical research, he is so totally involved in the workings of the MBS that it is virtually a part time job. He is a planner, an organizer, a doer. He rolls up his sleeves and makes things happen for the club, and thanks in large part to his efforts the bonsai community in Milwaukee is alive and well and growing. Of course he is not the only one contributing to the vibrancy of the MBS; the club has a full slate of officers and an active board, and all the membership is encouraged to pitch in and participate in various club functions and responsibilities. This is important. When most of what happens in a club rests on the shoulders of one individual, that club is at risk. If anything should happen to that one motivated person, if they get sick or move away or burn out, the community that the club represents will founder, and possibly fold. I have known this to happen.

There is a saying in bonsai that I have often heard repeated - "It's all about the trees!" I do not think this is true. I feel pretty certain that it is really all about the people, who share a common interest in the trees. That is why clubs are important, and why this forum is important, and why study groups, shows, conventions and public collections matter. They are all vehicles for bringing together people who enjoy the art of bonsai and want to share it with others. They are all means by which we build and maintain community.

right on Arthur...
on behalf of MBS, thanks for the acknowledgement
(i hope other members, apart from us in the Arbor Arts Collective, visit this forum)

from what i hear, we indeed are very fortunate to have a club like MBS.

and here is a pic from your visit:
(framed in carolina hornbeams)



hope to see you again.
kevin

My heart is broken for their loss. She was always kind and cheerful to me.

I'm praying for strength for they Doyle family.
Sam

PS - Thank you for sharing that Arthur. Beautiful!!!

Sam, thank you for your comment. Mary Kay Doyle was kind and cheerful to everyone!



It is a bit jarring, I think, to see an image like the one above at this time of year, when everything in this part of the world is in the green of summer's lushness. However, just last week (the 21st of June) we in the Northern Hemisphere experienced the summer solstice, so the length of our days is already growing shorter. It really will not be so long until autumn returns!

But my purpose in posting the photo seen above is not to look past the next 3 months towards the season to come, because shortening days or not, we are only now about to enter the overheated heart of the summer season. Rather, I want to tell you about a project undertaken this past winter on the the group planting pictured, a grove of Amur Maples (Acer ginalla).

This group is something I put together 14 or 15 years ago. The primary tree was a landscape specimen that came from the US National Arboretum, propagated, or so I was told, from an Amur Maple that was given to the United States as a gift from Nikita Khrushchev, on behalf of the people of the Soviet Union. The tree was 6' or so tall and potted in a large plastic nursery can. I cut it down and grew it into a bonsai, while also growing out some cuttings, and these together supplied the materials for the planting. The only problem, if a person is inclined to think of it as one, was that the cuttings came from a different Amur Maple. If you look at the photograph you can see that the foliage on the secondary trees is all the same, but that they all are different from the main tree. In my bonsai education I was taught that when a person makes a group or forest planting, the material should all be clonal, so that all the trees will be genetically the same. I can understand the desirability of that, but do not feel that it must be so. In this particular case, it does not bother me, perhaps because it is the primary tree that is different.

While I had no trouble accepting the foliage difference between the number 1 tree and the others in the group, there was another aspect of this planting that was bothersome - all of the trees had over time become rather pointy headed. The initial styling work on this specimen took place during a time when I was keeping very close to the standard bonsai ideal of shaping canopies into asymmetrical triangles, so they were pointed headed to begin with, but there was also a fair amount of apex-creep quietly occurring year after year. Here is a photograph made at the end of 2007:



Here is a view of the group planting this past winter, after leaves had dropped but before I did the overhaul of the top of the canopy:



This is what I ended up with after doing the restyling work:



Bonsai that began their careers being trained to a single line apex present a challenge if you decide later that you want to loosen up that decidedly artificial looking arrangement, and give them a more naturalistic appearance. Otherwise, the standard procedure for lowering the top of bonsai is to cut back to an existing branch that lends itself to being trained upwards, and then use that branch as a continuation of the trunk line running up to the apex. This essentially replaces one single line apex for another. Observation of mature deciduous trees in nature reveals that the vast majority of them do not have a single line apex, just as most of them do not have canopies in the shape of an asymmetrical triangle. The apexes of mature deciduous trees, as well as broad-leafed evergreens, and indeed of a great many coniferous trees, are rounded, and formed by many contributing parts. Instead of a single trunk line from the base of the tree to the apex, generally the trunk line splits into several lines going in various upward directions in the upper third of the tree, and these several lines together form the rounded apex.

Again, taking a bonsai that has been trained to have a single line apex and trying to convert it to a multiple line apex is a challenging undertaking. Sometimes it may mean setting back the developmental track of your tree by several years. In the case of this Amur Maple group, I decided to not be so dogmatic about it. Rather than effect a complete transformation from single to multiple lines, I focused on lowering the tops, rounding out the canopies and generally looking for branches that were situated in a way that presented the opportunity for them to go up at their ends, rather than out, and contribute as part of the crown. As a result, although most of the trees in the group still have a single line trunk from base to apex, the pointy-ness is eliminated and the crown is more relaxed.

If it is difficult to follow the written explanation of it, perhaps a visual comparison will prove more clear. What follows are before and after images of the tops of the trees; the first 2 being of the primary tree, the second 2 showing the secondary tree (located in the center of the 6-tree group) and the last 2 showing the combined apexes of the 2 trees on the furthest right of the composition. Remember, the height of all these trees was reduced by 3" or 4" (76mm or 101mm). See if you can see where the cuts were made:













Here is an image of this same Amur Maple group, as it currently looks out on display in the Bonsai Exhibition Garden:

Looks great after the re-styling. I love Amurs. This thread is fantastic. Thanks for keeping it going.

Mike

Thanks Arthur. Your words are great, but pictures really help. I look forward to October -- when will you provide info on activities/

Thank you Mike and Doug, for taking the time to read and respond to my previous post.

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a visit from my good friends John Geanangel and Ken Duncan, both of the Black Creek Study Group in Columbia, SC. They made the 3-hour drive from where they live to the NC Arboretum in Asheville to spend a day volunteering, and I gladly took advantage of their offer of free expert help. I had a project in mind, too.

Back in 2003, John and Ken joined me onstage at the Carolina Bonsai Expo to do a public demonstration. We made a large tray landscape planting, meant to represent a well known natural area that straddles the border between western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, named Roan Mountain. We used Shimpaku Junipers (Juniperus chinensis var. sargentii 'Shimpaku') and Zakura Azaleas (Rhododendron kiusianum 'Zakura'). I had grown these plants for about 5 years from cuttings, specifically for this project.

Here are a couple of images from that long ago demonstration:





When I saw these pictures today, after not having looked at them in a long while, I was surprised how young the plant material looked. I was also surprised by how badly Ken and John have aged!

I do not have a picture of the planting as it looked at its completion that day, but I found this image of it from 2005:



Here is what the 'Roan Mountain' planting looked like in 2012, when it was on display at the 3rd US National Bonsai Exhibition:



In preparation for being in the US National show I had gone through all the junipers and azaleas and pruned them in close detail, a job that took about 8 hours. In the 2 years since they had received only maintenance pruning, which meant keeping them tidy and presentable but not doing anything structural. They grew strongly. Here is what the planting looked like earlier last week:



I decided it was time to give the planting another thorough going over, and I knew I could count on my South Carolina friends to make the job easier.

John, Ken and I set ourselves up under the pavilion in the Bonsai Exhibition Garden on a beautiful summer day and went to work:



Being out in the garden meant we were essentially giving a free public demonstration, and throughout the time we were there a more or less steady stream of curious onlookers came by. It is interesting to meet the visitors, who are generally nice, come from all over and have varying amounts of familiarity with bonsai. Naturally, they ask questions. Invariably, a small number of questions get asked over and over - "What kind of plant is that?" "How do you know what to prune?", and of course the ever-popular "How old is that one?" I am used to this because I am regularly working out in the garden and constantly being asked such things. It is part of my job to be patient and friendly and answer the annoyingly repetitious questions without biting off the head of the innocent questioner, which I manage to do most of the time. But I was happy to have Ken and John on hand this day to lend support in this regard too, and I mostly hung back and let them engage with the public. They are both very good in dealing with people, and eagerly interacted with anyone who showed interest. Here is John talking with some visitors from Korea:



In all I think we went at it for about 3 hours or so. I was pleased with the end result:



Here are a couple of detail shots:





For the sake of easy comparison, here, in the order they appear, are the images of the 'Roan Mountain' tray landscape in 2005, last week before pruning, and now:







In bonsai, as in all facets of life, a large measure of our enjoyment comes from the people we meet along the way. I count myself as fortunate to have made friends early on in my bonsai journey with 2 people as talented as John Geanangel and Ken Duncan, and I hope I will have the pleasure of their company for many years to come. They both are members of the IBC, by the way. Both used to post here with some regularity but rarely do any more, although I know they both still check in to read on a frequent basis. So I will take this opportunity to thank them once again for their good help - I appreciate it, guys! Lets do it again sometime soon.

That's a heck of a progression. Thanks for taking the time to post it. I love both the current image, and also the 2005 image. For some reason, the negative space works in that earlier image to my eye almost better than the current image, although the trees are certainly much better and mature now.

It was a great day! Of course how could it not be when you combine good friends and something we all love...Mexican food! 

And you thought I was going to say bonsai!

John

One of my favorite tree landscapes! Was the cleanup all pruning and trimming, or did you rewire a bit, too?

Seems to me that a couple of those trees may be getting a bit too large?????? I know bonsai don't last forever, but won't this have to be totally redone at some point?

I will be on my way to South Carolina next week to visit some friends in Beauford SC on Lady Island
I am planning to stop by and visit your place and see those beautiful Bonsais in person.
Hope to see more on this trip from Canada.

the thing i really dig, besides the obvious vigor of the trees, is the play of light and shadow as the light makes its way through parts of the canopy and down into the understory... truly, a beautiful living snapshot of that part of the world.

really looking forward to my visit later this year.

Thank you for continuing this thread Arthur! I enjoy it immensely! I've been away from IBC for a bit, but I came back mostly to catch up on this thread.

The Trident from the Imperial Palace is one of my favorite maples period. Maybe my favorite Trident in the States! It's much bigger than I expected from previous pictures..

The progression and history of the Mugo was also very enjoyable.

Thanks!
Dan

Thanks to Judy, John, Jim, Judgie, Kevin and Dan for reading and commenting!

Dan, it is good to see you back here. I was thinking of you the other day, as I was looking at the second of our 2 Limber Pines, the one about which I have not yet posted. It is having a good growing season so I expect I will photograph it and post about it in the not too distant future.

Judy, I also like both images of the 'Roan Mountain' planting - the earliest and the most recent. The look of the planting in that picture from '05 actually looks more the way I think of the real Roan Mountain as looking when I picture it in my mind. Here is a photograph I think captures it well:



That image is from 2003, the year Ken, John and I originally put together the bonsai version of Roan Mountain. The 3 of us, in preparation for doing the planting later that year, traveled to Roan Mountain in mid-June to see the Catawba Rhododendron (Rhododendron catawbiense) in bloom. Luckily for us we visited maybe a week too soon to catch the flower show in full glory. I say "luckily" because the day we went, a weekday, we had the place pretty much to ourselves, and that is how I usually want to experience the great outdoors. When the flowers are at their peak, Roan Mountain is heavily trafficked with visitors who come to see the show, even on weekdays. On weekends the park is almost always busy, and when the flowers are out it can get downright crowded. When we went most of the flowers were not yet opened, but some were:







It should be understood that the great masses of rhododendron on Roan Mountain are naturally occurring, and these are old plants. A person can wiggle in under the canopy of some of the larger specimens and stand nearly upright, and if you do, it looks like this:



While the acres of rhododendron provide the flower show, they share the space with many other plant species. Most prominent among these others are 2 high-elevation Southern Appalachian conifers - Red Spruce (Picea rubens) and Fraser Fir (Abies fraseri), whose evergreen spires can be seen poking out of the rhododendron masses or framing them and providing a perfect dark green backdrop:





Although much of the spruce-fir forest in Southern Appalachia has been ravaged by environmental degradation and an introduced pest species, up on Roan Mountain you can still see some old, moss covered soldiers:



The summit of Roan Mountain is over 6,000 feet in elevation, so the climate can be severe. It may be the south and the climate is certainly changing, but there is still abundant snowfall up there:







The above photographs were made in the month of April, by the way, on a day when the weather in nearby Asheville was warm and sunny.

Our miniature Roan Mountain is sometimes bedecked in snow, too:



This planting is one of a small handful in our bonsai collection that consists entirely of plant material that can tolerate the extremes of winter, and so it remains on the bench, on display in the Bonsai Exhibition Garden all through the year.

While I am at it, I should post a picture of what the 'Roan Mountain' tray landscape looks like when the Rukizon Azaleas (Rhododendron kiusianum 'Rukizon') are in bloom:



That particular azalea cultivar was chosen because its bloom color closely approximated the colors of Catawba Rhododendron flowers.

Jim, your question about the need to eventually redo the 'Roan Mountain' landscape is legitimate.  Just as when you cultivate a bonsai in a pot, plantings on slabs will eventually run out of room to grow and be healthy. However, I think it is still some years away before I may have to deal with that in this particular case. The plants in the landscape have grown significantly larger, but they are still healthy and comfortable where they are. It may be that for visual reasons you feel some of the trees are too big, but that is a matter of personal taste and to me they look good. Judy also voiced appreciation for the appearance of the junipers when they were younger and smaller, and I do not disagree, but for me the power and stately weight of the more mature junipers has greater appeal.

Maintenance of these tray landscapes is an ongoing concern, as it is for single tree bonsai, but I think the process is a little more complex. In a single tree planting you have to manage all the parts of the tree to achieve and maintain balance and harmony. With a tray landscape you have to do that with each of the individual plants that make up the scene, but then all of them together must be managed so as to promote the balance and harmony of the whole.

I recently worked over in a similar fashion another of our tray landscape plantings. The piece in this case was our representation of another well known western North Carolina natural area - Mount Mitchel, highest peak in the US east of the Mississippi River. Our 'Mount Mitchel' planting features 2 dwarf spruce (Picea glauca 'Jean's Dilly'), an unknown dwarf azalea (Rhododendron cv.), and a ground cover of dwarf Creeping Jenny (Lysimachia japonica var. minutissima) and dwarf yarrow (Achillea x lewisii 'King Edward'). Well, the dwarf spruce wants nothing more than to form a dense, impenetrable, conical mass of foliage, while the azalea grows like a weed, and the Creeping Jenny and the yarrow are each bent on world dominance, ceaseless in their sprawling consumption of real estate. Here is what the planting looked like before pruning:



And after:



A case can be made that the 'Mount Mitchel' tray landscape looked better before getting thinned out, but that appealingly full and luxuriant look is not sustainable. If you are not of the opinion that it looked overgrown in the "before" image, a couple of weeks later you would be obliged to change your mind. So, when I think the plants in the scene are getting too plump and comfortable I go through them and trim them out in detail, lest they continue on their merry way and end up destroying the illusion they are meant to create. This is actually the 2nd iteration of this piece. The first, put together in 1996, finally got to the point where it was not possible for me to keep everything under control. After 10 years I took it apart and started over, with other, younger plants. I expect that may need to happen again someday.

By the way, I took 'Mount Mitchel' off display after the pruning session. I had to cut the azalea so drastically that it now needs to be out of sight for a little while, until it can grow back a few leaves:

Great workings, Arthur! Look very natural, and full of feelings, especially the one with a deadwood. As a Chinese, I'm very loving your bonsai works, I see simplicity, originality, natural beauty from them, without too many bonsai theories, and learning from nature. Perhaps these are the real bonsai.

Please keep posting!
Thanksss
Kang

Well said PeterKang. And Arthur as always thanks for your great pictures and well written narratives. Your pictures are a blessing to those of us who can not get out and about anymore. Thanks.

peterkang wrote: I see simplicity, originality, natural beauty from them, without too many bonsai theories, and learning from nature. Perhaps these are the real bonsai.

i agree doug !

right-on, kang !!!

Doug and Kevin - I appreciate the 2 of you for being faithful readers of this thread, and for being frequent commentators who always have something positive to offer.

Kang - Thank you for the kind words. I do bonsai in a way that makes sense to me, and allows me to fulfill my desire to communicate to others who share an appreciation of the natural world. Such people can be found everywhere on earth, regardless of their race or creed or the country they call home.

The other day I was working in the Bonsai Exhibition Garden, pruning one of the trees in the garden landscape, and I happened to be nearby a certain bonsai that has been on exhibit for the last few months. This specimen is modest in its size, approximately 16" (406.4mm) in height and width, is not currently flowering or bearing fruit, and has no dramatic deadwood. Yet throughout the time I was there, numerous people took particular interest in this tree, several of them even calling out to others they were with to come have a look. I was surprised. Of course I like the bonsai and think it has some merit, otherwise it would not be on display in the garden, but I never have thought of it as anything particularly special.

Well, they are all special, are they not? Any bonsai in which a person has invested care, and which in turn has responded with health and beauty, has some degree of specialness about it. There are features, however, that will draw more attention to any bonsai that has them. Deadwood - especially extensive, dramatic, stark white deadwood - leaps to mind as an example, although flowers, fruit and brightly colored foliage can all be included in this category. Size, as in very large or tiny sized bonsai, can also function in such a way. The bonsai that was appealing to so many visitors this day featured none of these attributes. The interest directed at this plant seemed entirely to do with its association to food:



This is a Mission Olive (Olea europaea 'Mission'), planted in a Robert Wallace container. It is too pointy headed for my current bonsai tastes, but perhaps that will change, by and by. According to Wikipedia: "The Mission olive is a cultivar of olive native to California, developed by Spanish missions along El Camino Real in the late 1700s." Further reading revealed this: "Since many olive cultivars are self-sterile or nearly so, they are generally planted in pairs with a single primary cultivar and a secondary cultivar selected for its ability to fertilize the primary one." That might explain why I have never seen this tree produce fruit, although I think I have seen it flower. I freely confess to knowing very little about olives; they are not cold hardy enough to overwinter in western NC without the protection of a greenhouse, and this specimen is the only one I have ever grown. Still, I have seen photographs of gnarly, old olive trees:



And I have seen van Gogh paintings of them, as well:



So I have some appreciation for them as trees of character and distinction. I have also seen photographs of olive bonsai that have been made from old collected plants, and some of these are highly admirable. If olives could be grown around here without overwintering concern and I had access to them, I am certain I would be attracted to this species.

As it is, we have this one in our collection entirely by chance. One day in 2005 an older woman came by the Arboretum and asked to speak with me. She carried with her a bushy looking, glossy leaved plant in a production bonsai pot. She explained to me that the plant was a Mission Olive, 50 years old, grown from seed by her husband who had recently passed away. Her husband had started the plant when he and his wife were younger and living in California, and the plant had lived all its life in a container, and had been carried all over the United States as the couple grew older and relocated several times. The man trained his olive to be a bonsai, but in his later years he did not really keep up with it other than to keep it alive, and it lost its bonsai appearance. He still cared about it, though, and his wife did too. That is why she brought it to the Arboretum that day, hoping it might find a home. I accepted it as a donation mostly because I enjoyed the story behind it, but also because it was beginning to show the character of age in its strangely shaped trunk. I wish I had a picture of what it looked like back then, but I do not.

As I said, I have never thought of this tree as anything special, beyond the story that lies behind it and up until now I was the only one who knew that. But the association with olive fruit, and perhaps even more so with olive oil, causes people to take interest in this plant. That, and the trunk is still pretty interesting:

That's a beautiful backstory for a tree.  I'm so glad you've been able to take a tree that meant a lot to them, and make it something for other people to enjoy.  I know many people, myself included, worry about what will happen to their trees after they're gone.  I think that the fact that you've gone so far as to put it on display says wonderful things about you.  I agree that it is too pointy.  Perhaps you can round out the apex over the next few years. In doing so you may be able to thicken the mid trunk some. To my eye it is too thin at the point where it joins the large base.

A great little tree and better yet, the story. Hopefully we all will obtain, remember and pass on the story behind the trees we obtain from our bonsai brothers and sisters who have departed this earth. Thanks again Arthur.

IMHO, the better the story, the more special the tree...

regardless of its appearance, it meant something to it's owner and for that to be carried forward by subsequent owners makes it even more endearing.

cheers a.j.