It is rare to have the opportunity to speak with a true expert in the practice of bonsai. In fact, there aren’t very many of them, and most speak Japanese. We have the great fortune on this episode of the Dogwatch to be able to speak with Bjorn Bjorholm, who is one of the rising stars in the practice and study of bonsai. Luckily for us, Bjorn speaks Japanese and English, as he grew up in Knoxville, TN, and now oversees the flourishing Eisei-en Bonsai Garden in Nashville. In our conversation, we learn how Bjorn grew up with a strong interest in bonsai and Japanese culture, hear about his early experiences in Japan and his six-year apprenticeship at Kouka-en bonsai nursery in Osaka, Japan. Bjorn explains the approach of Eisei-en and how it compares to a traditional Japanese bonsai garden, and how bonsai helps us experience nature and get similar benefits if we went further afield.
Our feature today is the forest style of bonsai. This style is one of a number of styles–such as upright, slanting, and cascade–in which five or more trees are used to create a miniature forest. The number and species of trees chosen, their placement relative to one another, and their planting substrate work together to create a unique approximation of a forest scene. Bjorn shares with us that this form is the one that appeals most to people new to bonsai. In our interview, he describes that he made a forest clump when he was 16 , and this is one of the very few plants in his garden that he will never sell.
#33 Transcript
Michael Canfield: Hello. This is Michael Canfield, and thank you for joining us today on The Dogwatch. A Dogwatch is an evening shift of earlier late duty or the people who undertake it. This Dogwatch considers the natural world and the things that help us experience it, from dogs to watches and everything in between. Ultimately, it’s a place for us to go wherever curiosity takes us. It is rare to have the opportunity to speak with a true expert in the practice of bonsai. In fact, there aren’t very many of them, and most speak Japanese. We have the great fortune on this episode of The Dogwatch to be able to speak with Bjorn Bjorholm, who is one of the rising stars in the practice and study of bonsai. Luckily for us, Bjorn speaks Japanese and English as he grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and now oversees the flourishing Ace Bonsai Garden in Nashville. In our conversation, we learn how Bjorn grew up with a strong interest in bonsai and Japanese culture, hear about his early experiences in Japan and his six year apprenticeship at Kouka-en Bonsai Nursery in Osaka, Japan. Bjorn explains the approach of Eisei-en and how it compares to a traditional Japanese bonsai garden and how bonsai helps us experience nature and get some similar benefits than if we went further afield. Our feature today is the forest style of bonsai. The style is one of a number of styles, such as upright, slanting, and cascade, and in this one, five or more trees are used to create a miniature forest. The number and species of trees chosen their placement relative to one another, and their planting substrate worked together to create a unique approximation of a forest scene. Bjorn shares with us that this form is one that appeals most to people new to bonsai. In our interview, he describes that he made a forest clump when he was a teenager, and this is one of the very few plants in his garden that he will never sell. And now let’s turn to our conversation with Bjorn Bureau of the Eisei-En Bonsai Garden.
Bjorn, thanks so much for joining us today On the Dogwatch.
Bjorn Bjorholm: Thank you for having me.
Michael Canfield: So I’m assuming you’re currently at Eisei-En and have been out in the garden today. Maybe already. I don’t know. And I’m just curious, kind of what’s going on there. Is there anything new?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah. So bright and early in the morning here at the moment. I usually go out first thing in the morning and kind of do a walk through of the nursery just to make sure everything’s looking good for the day, make sure that nothing got blown off the benches and nothing got lifted from the nursery overnight. We’ve never had that happen before in the past, but I always like to go around and double check everything.
Michael Canfield: But lifted? You mean stolen?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Exactly. It does happen. So we have all sorts of layers of protection here at the nursery to sort of hedge against that.
Michael Canfield: One of the things that I will just ask you is, in one of your videos, I saw a German Shepherd. We’re sort of partial to pets and dogs on this podcast. We have a soft spot. Do you have a dog in the garden there?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah. So we do have a German Shepherd, a female German Shepherd. She’s about two and a half years old at this point, but she is allowed in the garden. But I typically don’t let her in there unless I’m in the garden and unless we have all of the trees up off the ground because she’s a little bit rambunctious and has been known to plow through things without really thinking about it. So typically she’s kept outside of the garden, but still kind of around the nursery grounds, around the outsides as kind of a layer of protection. She’s the sweetest dog in the world. I don’t think she’d hurt anybody. I probably shouldn’t be saying this on a podcast in a public setting, but she probably wouldn’t hurt anybody. But she looks terrifying.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, well, they know, right? Especially German shepherds. They would know context, too, at night or whatever, if somebody’s hanging around, they would bark and might really cause a fuss. It’s good from the videos and some of the cool sort of I know if it’s drone footage or whatever that you have from above, it’s a very beautiful space. You have the sort of garden itself, but then you have some of the property around it as well.
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah. So we purchased this property. It’s a ten acre piece of property here in just outside of Nashville. We bought it about four and a half years ago at this point. So we were very lucky to be able to find this amount of acreage in this area here. All the stars just happened to align at the right time, and we were able to purchase it. But I wanted to buy a piece of property that was quite large so we could kind of have a much more private location for the nursery to kind of be off the beaten path. And as a matter of fact, where we live back here, we have four neighbors, and each neighbor has ten acres. So it’s I guess about 50 acres total that we live on back here, but we own ten of that. So the nursery itself that’s contained within the fencing around the garden is probably about an acre to an acre and a half, something like that. And then the remaining nine acres or so, eight and a half, nine acres is wooded and kind of open fields as well. So we have kind of a little Oasis back here in the woods.
Michael Canfield: Wow. It sounds fantastic. And I have a few questions about that. Even though the idea of this interview and having you on is to kind of have you help us think about how the undertaking of bonsai can help people approach nature. We’re largely about things that either are about nature or help us experience nature on the podcast. That’s kind of a loose philosophy or guiding principle. But I also want to have a chance to get to know you a little bit, too. So there’s some questions that will interweave in there. And I’m curious, since we’re on the subject, do you have trees in the ground, too? I know some nurseries would have trees in the outside area right outside of the garden proper. Do you have, like, a farm team of bonsai plants in the ground, too, or do you not sort of grow things up from that?
Bjorn Bjorholm: So on the property here, it’s actually limestone that runs underneath the ground everywhere here. It’s an area that’s well known for that issue. As a matter of fact, there are very few houses in this area that actually have basements in them because it’s nearly impossible, cost wise, to build a basement in this area. So it’s very hard for us to actually ground grow anything around here. But we do grow a lot of stock material in plastic containers and also wooden boxes that we build out. But those are set on top of the ground or on top of our benches here. Right. But that’s something that you might not see if you’re watching your videos, et cetera. So much is that you have some material that’s kind of been waiting. Yeah, we would call it prebonsai. We actually have the garden broken up into three sections. So when you walk in the very first section is kind of our display garden. We call it the upper garden. Okay. This is where we keep our trees that are very highly refined stuff that could instantly immediately go into an exhibition and hold its own. And then in the middle garden, which is just one step further down, it’s kind of a tiered ground setup that we have here. In the middle garden, we have some projects that are pretty close to being exhibition ready, some projects that are kind of mid level of development. And then as you move further down into the lower garden, which is the largest section of the garden, that’s actually where we have most of our propagation material, Yamadori, for example, which are collected trees from the mountains that haven’t been worked quite yet. And some of our long term projects that were growing in containers or in wooden boxes.
Michael Canfield: Would that be typical of a bonsai garden in Japan, et cetera? Is that sort of upper, middle and lower, or is that something that you sort of have established?
Bjorn Bjorholm: So that’s very different than what’s done in Japan. It’s such a saturated market when it comes to bonsai that each nursery sort of has its own specialization. So, for example, where I studied in Osaka, it’s a refinement nursery. So all of the trees that are there are exhibition ready trees. That’s what my oyakata, my teacher focused on, that’s what I spent all of my time doing was refining those plants for exhibition. Whereas if you go to another nursery, it might be highly specialized, only focusing on, say, grafting, and maybe only grafting one or two species, but they’re the best grafters in the entire country and therefore in the entire world when it comes to the aesthetics of the grafting success rate with the grafting, the cultivars that they’re using. Or you might go to another nursery where all they do is field grow Japanese black Pines, for example, which is something that you’ll see if you go to, say, Takamazu, which is a city on Shikoku Island, they’re very famous for fuel growing black Pines and white Pines. So you’ll go down there and you’ll see acres and acres and acres like row after row after row of, say, just Japanese black Pines that have been in the ground for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years. And some of those that have been in the ground long enough and maintained properly, those could be lifted out of the ground, put in a container and brought to a refinement nursery like Fujikawa-san, where I studied. We would refine that, sell it, and then it would go into an exhibition. So kind of different. And so how is yours different from that then? So being back in the States mostly has been here for a while. I mean, it was sort of introduced after World War II with a lot of the Japanese coming over to the States, like Yogi O Shamura, for example. John Naka, who is from California, was one of the big proponents of bonsai back in those days. It’s been here for a while, but it’s still relatively new, relatively young in the States, so it’s not become so highly specialized here. So if you do multi professionally here, you really do need to sort of be a Renaissance man, a Renaissance woman. When it comes to setting up a garden here, you have to do a little bit of everything. Because if I were just to rely on having a business and making money off of refining trees, we could probably do okay and eke out a living. But if we want to be really successful, as inertia, we have to have all of these different streams of revenue, and that requires not feel growing, but growing stuff from cuttings air layers, propagation, collected material, raw material, styling that stuff up, working on long term projects that are going to take 15 to 20 years, maybe even longer to come to fruition, but you have to do all of that at the same time so that you’re continually bringing in revenue for the garden and keeping it afloat.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. It seems also like you have multiple points where you can connect with different levels of bonsai enthusiasts or potential professionals, et cetera. As far as developing the community in the States is different right where you can fit it, at least partly. It’s a question, but it does seem like in your videos and your initiatives, which we’ll talk about bonsai -u, et cetera, I could imagine having that range of facilities, et cetera, and plants would be more inspiring to someone, say, like me, who again, I am at the first stage of bonsai I’m growing, even though I’ve been interested for many years, since my grandmother actually sort of introduced me to it in the late Seventies, early 80s, in the sense of this idea of what it was. But if I just came to a refinement nursery, I think I would just be like, wow, that’s beautiful. And how does that relate to me? Sure. So I could see that being really important and maybe I’m projecting onto your sort of garden, et cetera. But it does would you say that’s true about where you’re fitting in, that obviously you don’t do a lot of beginner classes, et cetera. But it seems like you run a pretty nice range of access points.
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah, very much so. But I will say we do lean heavily towards the more kind of refined and finished trees because that’s what my training was in Japan. That’s what everybody is driving for. So if I don’t have a good number of trees like that here at my nursery, it looks like I didn’t learn anything in Japan or I don’t have the skills to build that stuff out. So that’s why we have that display garden. When people walk in, it wows you when you come into the garden. So a lot of our really large Boltai trees that would be considered too large for Boltai in Japan are up in that garden. There the upper garden, so that when you come in, it’s just this wow factor as soon as you walk through the front gate. But if you walk in and then go to the middle and down into the lower, you can sort of see a range of how it’s done and the process as well. It seems like exactly the cool thing about my garden here is that prior to going to Japan, I was in Japan for nine years. Prior to going to Japan, I had already been involved in bonsai for nine years. So I already sort of built up a little collection at my folks’ place before I left. And my dad was also into bonsai as well as kind of like a father son hobby when I was growing up. So he maintained a handful of trees that I left in the States. And now that I’m back in the US here, we’re starting some of those similar projects from scratch now so people can actually see what it looks like when you start those projects now, say, from cuttings or seedlings and what it looks like at this point, like 20 something years on, 22, 23 years on those trees actually coming to fruition. And we have trees that are in all stages between those levels there. So from that perspective, I think it inspires people to see that you can take very basic material and build it out yourself and turn it into something really beautiful.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. I found that inspiring on one of your videos recently. Maybe it was your walk through just this spring, but you showed a couple of the things that your dad and you or your dad had created a long time ago. There were sort of groves, small groves, etc. And is that what you mean, that you sort of see those and then make a new one so you could compare what you did or you did 20 years ago and what it would look like to do that now? Is that what you mean exactly?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah. There’s one tree in particular, actually, two trees here at the garden, but one in particular that I featured on an episode of Bonsai-U for free on YouTube a number of years ago, probably two years ago at this point. It’s a Japanese Maple clump, that’s one that I put together from seedlings when I was 16 years old, and I just turned 36, 20 years ago at this point. But we have that tree in the garden now, and you can see just how beautiful it has become. But in addition to that, we have a whole bunch of little clusters of seedlings that we’ve put together in a very similar manner that we just did say last year or this year. So you can see right from the start what you’re dealing with and what you could potentially end up with. And that Maple, the one that’s 20 years old at this point, it still isn’t fully developed. It’s still in the process of being developed, which is, I think, something that is interesting to people but also can deter people from getting involved in bonsai. Because when you say it’s 20 years old, we put 20 years of work into this, and it’s still not come to total fruition yet. That sounds like way too much of a time investment. But when you really get involved in bonsai, you understand that, particularly when you’re dealing with deciduous material like Maples, for example, it does take a very long time. But the reward of putting in all of that effort and getting that final result is totally worth it.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. It’s clear from the material you have and examples like that. I wanted to start by just getting to know you a little bit. I know some of the listeners here will know who you are, be very familiar with Bonsai-U and Eisei-en and all those things, and some will be people who might not know a whole lot about it. So there are certainly some interviews you’ve done and material that really show where you’ve come from, who you are in the bonsai community. But I wanted to ask just a couple of quick questions about kind of your overall narrative and I wanted to start it in sort of a weird way in the sense that the word bonsai is one that causes some consternation in people when they are especially coming to it in the sense of how it’s pronounced. I don’t know if you ever saw the Saturday Night Live video on enchiladas, but I think it was 1990 or so. Mike Myers was in it, Bob Costa was in it, and they were playing with this idea that enchiladas and words that came from the Spanish language. People sometimes say it in a really affected manner. Right. And it’s pretty funny. So you should check it out, listeners. And if you’re at all interested, it’s super funny. Mike Myers was just a sort of cast member. He wasn’t super famous yet. That’s how old this was. So anyway, when I say bonsai or bonsai, it depends on the context. People in polite company often don’t say bonsai and think you’re kind of being pedantic if you say it that way. But I just wanted to help listeners understand that it’s not being pedantic or whatever. It’s just you’re an expert, you’ve studied in Japan. You say it bonsai. Right. And that’s kind of how it’s said. And if you say it bonsai, well, no big deal, but that’s just the way that word is translated into the English language. Is that correct?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Right. Yeah. So there actually is a word Banzai in Japanese. It’s banzai. And what that translates to is essentially Long Live the Emperor or 1000 Years to the Emperor. So this was like a chant that was screamed during wartime, particularly during World War II. As a matter of fact, if you watch what were those movies that were put out by Clint Eastwood? There was one from the American perspective and one from the Japanese perspective. I don’t remember letters from Iwo Jima or something like that. If you watch that movie, I think there are a couple of scenes in there where you actually see some of the Japanese soldiers throw their arms up in the air and yell Banzai. That is a chant to the Emperor. So it’s a completely different word, a completely different meaning, different characters, and of course, pronunciation, too, whereas bonsai is specifically referring to these artistically pruned and styled trees in a pot. So totally separate thing. It doesn’t annoy me when I have customers and clients and friends who’ve been in bonsai for 25, 30 years and they refuse to pronounce it bonsai, they’ll just call it bonsai when they come to the nursery. That’s totally fine. I’m not going to correct somebody for that. But when I say I use the proper word because I do speak Japanese. I actually got my undergraduate degree in Japanese language. And then living in Japan for almost a decade, I became pretty fluent in Japanese. As a matter of fact, I still take online Japanese lessons every week now.
Michael Canfield: Oh, really?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah. Just to keep up my language skills, because I spent so much time and effort learning it that I don’t want to forget it.
Michael Canfield: Well, in that vein, then there was a time when Little Bjorn, right, or not little. But as a kid would have not necessarily understood this difference. And I know, as I seem to remember as a kid sort of shouting bonzai a couple of times, not knowing what that meant but picking it up from a movie or whatever in the context of playing war or whatever. There was probably a time when you didn’t know this. Right. But it was quite early for you. Can you just kind of give us the arc of starting up? I believe you grew up in Knoxville, if I’m not mistaken, and ended up studying bonsai in Japan for nine years and becoming a bonsai professional who’s trained in Japan now has a garden. What was that arc like? How did that happen?
Bjorn Bjorholm: So I was first introduced to bonsai when I was twelve. I saw the Karate Kid movies, and prior to that, when I was about eight years old, I had actually started taking karate in like an after school program and got really heavily involved in it and very interested in Japanese culture and Japanese architecture and art and things like that. So when I was twelve, I saw the Karate Kid movie and I saw bonsai in there, and I thought, man, this looks really cool. So I asked my folks for my 13th birthday for a tree, and they obliged and bought me a Japanese garden Juniper, green mound Juniper from Home Depot that was already planted in a pot and had the rocks glued on the top with a little Mudman like the Mr. Mikey Mudman underneath it. So I got that from my 13th birthday. It promptly died two weeks later because I kept it on my nightstand. But by that point, I was totally hooked and wanted to pursue bonsai as a hobby for sure. So I ended up buying whatever books I could find. And this was like late 90s, early 2000s. O, it’s still kind of pre Internet bonsai days. There really wasn’t much information online. There are a few websites out there, I think a couple of forms or maybe one form had just popped up around that time online. But most of the information at that time was from books that were written in like the 60s, 70s and 80s. So not a lot of up to date information necessarily, but started the Knoxville Bonsai Society with my dad when I was, I think, 16 years old, 15-16 years old. I think our first meeting we had maybe five people, including the two of us, very small group. And then it ended up growing and growing. And actually the Knoxville Club just had its 20th anniversary show last August, and they invited me back to be the guest artist for that, which was very cool. But in the interim, in between the last 20 years let’s see, when I was 22, I finished up my University degree, and immediately two weeks later, I was in Japan, starting as an apprentice, doing like a three month trial period at Fujika, which is one of the, I would say, the best nursery in all of Kansai, which is kind of the central area of Japan. It’s like Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe, kind of that region of Japan. Fujikawa-san’s Nursery is very well known for the quality of bonsai that are maintained there and the size of bonsai. So he does everything from shohin to large trees, but we focus mainly on kind of medium size to larger plants there. So he spent six years as an apprentice there and then stayed on for an additional three years following graduating from my apprenticeship, kind of lived near the nursery and would work there as artists in residence while I would start traveling around the world teaching at that point. So I was actually on the road about 250 days out of the year for those last three years that I was in Japan. So I was actually in Japan very little, but I was still a resident of Japan.
Michael Canfield: Wow. So now you’ve done that training. Can you describe and it might feel kind of awkward for you to answer this question, but can you describe your sort of status as someone who’s a bonsai professional trained in Japan? Do you see what I mean? What does that afford you as far as where you fit into the bonsai community and sort of the teaching of bonsai, both thinking in Japan. I also know in the United States you also, I believe, have taken on an apprentice as well. Where do you fit and where does that allow you to fit into the broader bonsai world?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean, in Japan, my wife and I had actually sort of toyed with the idea of staying in Japan long term and setting up a nursery over there, which would have been a possibility. But there are a few things that we were really concerned with. One was being able to become a permanent resident there is very difficult, and you can’t really take out a loan to build a business or buy a home unless you’re a permanent resident. So it would have taken years and years for us to get to that point. That was one aspect of it. But the other aspect, which kind of ties into your question here a bit more, was as a foreigner in Japan, opening a nursery and then competing with the local Japanese multi professionals in the Japanese market, that probably wouldn’t have gone over too well. I have a feeling I would have been shut out in certain aspects in terms of getting access to material, for example, being invited to certain events, things like that. That may be an overreaction on my part, but I have a feeling that probably would have been the case. But the fact that I came back to the States and set up a nursery here when I go back to Japan, there’s no tension in that regard when I go back. So I wouldn’t say I’m famous in Japan, but all the professionals know who I am in Japan. I know who all of them are as well. So everybody gets along just fine. It’s no problem. But coming back to the States in terms of setting up a nursery here, definitely having the training in Japan, not only from the perspective of having studied in Japan, knowing how a nursery operates and knowing how to build trees, I was able to start a business a bit more easily than someone who hadn’t done that, but also the fact that I’d been there and I have the reputation of having worked on certain types of material quality material as well, and how I’m able to build out trees that seems to draw in a lot of people wanting to purchase plants from me or to study here at my nursery. As a matter of fact, a vast majority of our revenue for the nursery is based on education. So we have intensive classes here at the Garden at the moment. We have, I think, about 90 students who are involved in those intensive classes across 13 different groups, and we’re going to be adding a couple more towards the end of this year. But those students travel from not only within the United States but around the world. We have some students who fly in from Europe a couple of times a year to work with me, some who come from Latin America as well. So having that training in Japan definitely set me up in a way to be able to draw, I think, people to me. And I think in addition to studying in Japan, it was also the amount of travel that I did after my apprenticeship, actually getting my name out there and showing people what I could do that really helped in terms of being able to build a place and then have people actually come to me, which was ultimately the goal.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. And again, I appreciate you answering that. It seems like honestly, because it’s hard to sort of place yourself in those situations. Right. But it does seem like you’re an expert, and when a person might want to pursue bones as a professional, there are multiple ways to do it. And you’ve talked about that in other interviews, et cetera. But it seems like going to Japan, actually going through what is a five year apprenticeship at a minimum, learning all those things seems to be and have set you up in a really important way as one of the next generation of bonsai professionals that really carry bonsai forward. Would you agree with that? Bjorn Bjorholm: Yes, I would agree with that, but I would say that it’s not a necessity to do an apprenticeship in Japan, to become a professional artist or multi professional is what I call myself back in the States or in Europe or wherever you happen to live. There’s some really great examples of people here in the States who have been to Japan to visit maybe, but who have not done apprenticeships there, haven’t even really studied there. So I give you one person in particular, Sergio Kwan. He owns M Five Boltai Up in New Jersey. Okay. He focuses mainly on deciduous material. He’s traveled to Japan and visited the nurseries and the shows and whatnot, but he’s never done a full apprenticeship. But he’s incredibly talented when it comes to building deciduous material. He’s got an eye for the arts, he’s got an understanding of the horticulture, and he does bonsai as kind of a side thing. But I have a feeling in the future he’ll move more towards doing it full time professionally. So folks like that who have the drive and have the artistic capabilities and the horticultural understanding and also the business sense as well, that’s something that a lot of people lack either have the artistic aspect of the business aspect, but not a combination of the two. You have to have a combination of the two to be able to successfully build a bonsai nursery.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. It seems very clear that there are multiple elements. And you talked about the 80 20 rule, even in the practice of bonsai. I would think that it’s all about the art and the shaping, et cetera. But one of the things I’ve taken from some of the things you’ve done is that it’s almost 80%, like logistics and craft and understanding how to keep trees alive, etc. And then art, and then there’s the business side on top of that, which you have to have all those things, it sounds like, and it can be learned in multiple ways. I wanted to ask you just a couple more quick questions about the garden you have, and then we’ll move on to sort of collecting in the field and nature, et cetera. We are sort of, if we’re lucky, most people, if you can get to a garden center or find a place that has a bonsai nursery to see some in the wild, so to speak, see them and be able to purchase them, for example. Mostly they’d be places that are just selling those small bonsai plants for your garden. I’m curious, kind of about the model in the sense of, you know, you mentioned you walk into the upper garden, what percentage of those plants are yours or are you taking care of people’s plants? And I’m wondering kind of how that works with the material you have there. It’s not just that you have a place where you’re just selling bonsai plants. Right. You’re taking care of some of them. You’ve got some that you may not want to get rid of ever. What are the fractions like?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah. So I would say that currently it’s a nursery, probably 50% to 60% of the trees that we have at the garden right now are client trees or student trees that we maintain over the long term. For example, if it’s a student, our program here is a three year program for the intensive course that we put on. So quite often students will bring several trees down to the first session. They’ll keep them here, and then when they come down, the next time they don’t have to drive things back and forth, they can fly in. It makes it a lot easier, and then we just maintain them in the interim and they get to work on them when they come down. We also have clients who will purchase very expensive bone time and maintain them here. They’ll either purchase them from me or purchase them somewhere else and then bring them here, and then we’ll maintain those over the long term in preparation, save for the US National show. Or we may maintain them in perpetuity forever and only take them to the client’s location when they have, say like a dinner party or a get together or something, display the trees, and then we go and pick them up and bring them back. That’s relatively rare that we do that, but we do have a few trees here that would fall into that category.
Michael Canfield: And as a little bit of advertising, if someone wanted to be part of that educational process, like get into bonsai to learn from you, etc. And what’s the onramp for that? Bjorn Bjorholm: So if you go to my website, you can go to bjornbjorhom.com or eisei-en.com. At the top there’s a little tab that says school. So if you click on that, it will give you all of the information for how we operate the schools, the types of species and information that you’ll learn if you come to the program, and then you can send an email via that page as well to me, just letting me know that you’re interested in the classes and we’ll put you on the waiting list. So we have a pretty extensive waiting list at the moment, but we are going to be adding some extra classes probably starting in December of this year. So I’m going to be sending out a message to all those folks on the waiting list here, probably in the next couple of months with first dip sign up information about that. And do you have to have a lot of experience to get involved, or how much do you have to know? Well, I usually recommend that people have at least a couple of years of experience in Bonsai. We’ve had a few rank beginners coming into the classes, and I think it’s just a little bit over their head. It’s a little bit too intense for people in that situation, and a couple of those folks have actually dropped out of the program. Okay. But anybody who’s got at least a couple of years of experience, maybe done some workshops with other professionals or attends club meetings in their local area for a couple of years. Somebody like that would be great for the program. So kind of like not rank beginner, but kind of beginner moving into intermediate phase all the way up to we have full on professionals who come in to the program here as well.
Michael Canfield: Cool. That’s great. And I’m glad to hear there’s a lot of interest. Oh, yeah. A couple of other quick things. In some ways, I’m sure these trees become very valuable to you, not only for money, but also in the sense that you feel like you’re a shepherd or curator of them. But there are a couple that in your collection or that you have there that you could point to that are just ones that maybe you don’t have favorites but that are just like ones that you feel are incredibly meaningful plants to you. Maybe one or two.
Bjorn Bjorholm: Sure. Yeah. One would be a Chinese Quince that I have in the nursery here. It’s an unassuming tree. Most people kind of pass over it when they walk through the garden, but it’s a tree that I’ve grown for the last probably 15-16 years. At this point, it was a stump that was field grown that when I purchased it, I had no branches on it whatsoever. And now I’ve developed it into sort of a full on beautiful ramified silhouette, which is hard to do with that particular species. It’s a medium sized tree as well, which is also hard to do with Chinese quince. They tend to be fast growing trees and grow quite large very quickly. So that would be one of the plants I featured that in a few photos on my Instagram in the past, which is I think it’s just instagramasanboltai if you guys are interested in checking that out. Yeah. And then in addition to that, the Japanese Maple that I mentioned earlier that I put together as a clump when I was 16 years old, that’s one that has a lot of sentimental value to me. So of all the trees that are in the garden, those are probably the only two that I would never sell. Everything else in the nursery is for sale. But with that being said, the trees that have a lot more value to them, not only monetarily but also time, investment and sort of sentimental connection to me, I’m a little bit hesitant to sell them to certain people. So I like to make sure I vet who is purchasing the tree or at least understand who’s going to be maintaining those trees on behalf of the person purchasing them before I let those trees leave the garden.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. Because it’d be easy to have it die. Is that what you mean? Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, that’s fantastic. And I want to turn a little bit to collecting. One of the things that I’m interested in is kind of how you go out and get material and it seems like there are a couple of different avenues for that. One of my favorite videos you did was a while ago when you were in Japan. You did this Vlog of you going in this van around Japan finding these trees, which I just thought was a great video. I don’t know why it spoke to me so much, but it was just like this adventure. So obviously one of the avenues is going and finding established trees and bringing them back. And I’m kind of wondering how you would choose what you would be looking for in the field, quote, unquote. And then I think the other then move into truly people go out and find actual plants in the wild. I think you call it Yamadori, where you would find places that had a growing tree that you would dig up and bring it back. And I’m curious about the tradition of that, how it happens in Japan, how it happens in the United States, etc. And so that’s kind of a big question. But that’s kind of where I wonder how you think about going to the field and finding these plans.
Bjorn Bjorholm: Yeah. I mean, in Japan it’s very different because like I said before, it’s a saturated market there. So you can find beautiful trees at all of these different nurseries around the country. So, for example, with Fujikawa in that particular video that you’re referencing, I think we were buying for the Kouka-en, which is the Japanese National exhibition that’s held every year in February. So prior to that exhibition, Fujika and I would travel around Japan in his hiatus, which is kind of this giant van that Toyota makes all the multi professionals. It’s like a requisite that you have. It’s a cool car. I don’t know. Yes. It’s awesome. Yeah. And you can fit a lot of stuff in there, even though it’s pretty compact. But we would travel from Osaka, usually go north up to Tokyo, sometimes out to Abuse, which is near Nagano, way out in the middle of the Japanese Alps, because there are some really great nurseries out there. We usually spend like a week to two weeks on the road just traveling from nursery to nursery looking for material that we could get for a good price that was maybe a little bit unkempt but had potential if we fixed it up a little bit to go up in value very quickly. Fujikawa is very good at finding material like that at these different locations. We would then bring that back to his nursery and then style it up, clean it up, paint the dead wood with lime sulfur, for example, to brighten it up, maybe add some wire to it, sometimes switch out the pots as well, because quite often that can change the appearance and the value of the tree and the resaleability of that very quickly. And we would do that in typically December, we’d go around, find the material January we’d fix it up. And then February was the time for the show. So that was a huge part of his business model there. But the difference here in the States is that we don’t have a whole bunch of nurseries here that have thousands and thousands of highly developed trees. We have to go out and find basically raw material and build it, which takes a lot longer time. So if you’re talking about conifers, you can build a tree from a raw Yamadori, collect a piece of material to a finished tree, and say three to five years if you really know what you’re doing deciduous material, it could be 10, 20, 30 years, depending on the material. And in addition to that, there are some nurseries and some people, some private collectors who have trees that every once in a while they’re highly developed, really beautiful. Every once in a while they’re willing to sell those trees off. But that’s very rare here because we don’t have such a huge number of highly developed plants in the States. If somebody gets a hold of something like that, they don’t want to let it go or the prices are exorbitantly high here just a supply and demand issue in the States. So it’s a lot more difficult to drive around, find really good material, and then take that, fix it up and sell it at say, like the US National show, which we have in September in New York every other year. So much more difficult to do something like that here in the States.
Michael Canfield: So have you done that before? Have you gone out and searched for Yamadori in the United States, like going to Montana or wherever it is and look for stuff in terms of going out and purchasing from collectors who live in those areas and collect professionally? Bjorn Bjorholm: Yes, I’ve done that multiple times, like flown out to California, drove all over California, drove back through like Wyoming, for example, down to Colorado, into Texas and then back over to Tennessee, picking up Yamadori that was already collected along the way. But in terms of actually going out into nature myself and collecting the trees from nature, I’ve only done that one time, and that was because I was invited by some friends out in Arizona to go with them. But it’s not something that I do for a couple of reasons. Number one, the biggest issue is that you have to obviously get permission from the people who either own the land or from the government if it’s publicly owned land. So that’s a little bit difficult to do. Number one, that takes a lot of time. Number two, when you go out and search for the material, it can take sometimes days or weeks to find a good location. So you’re going to be out there for a long time. Number three, when you collect the stuff, you then have to drive it back cross country. And I would have to maintain it here at my nursery. And there’s no guarantee that that material would survive. So there’s a lot of costs involved, a lot of time and effort involved, and potentially very little return on that investment. Whereas if I go through the folks who live in those areas and do this professionally, the guys that I work with have usually like a 90% to 95% success rate when they collect stuff from the wild. And it’s already established when I purchased it. So when I bring it back to my nursery here the longest, we would have to wait before we work on something might be a year. Sometimes we can immediately start working on some of that material. So the turnaround time is a lot faster from a business perspective. Yeah. I believe in one of your videos, they showed up with a trailer with some of those bones that have been collected. I’m curious. Michael Canfield: Obviously, it makes sense that that’s not a good use of your professional time, right. In the sense that your time is more, I would think, valuable working on the material because that’s what you’re trained to do and that’s where your expertise is. I’m curious, what do those people who do that for a living look for? Like, how do you identify those things, or how would one go out? What would they be looking for? How would they be identifying those things? You say you went out with someone once, but how do they do that?
So a few things. I mean, most of the stuff that’s being collected, particularly out in the Rockies, is coniferous materials. So Pines and junipers furs, spruce plants like that. So with those species, typically what we’re looking for is interesting movement in the trunks, some sort of, say, Deadwood characteristic on the plants, and maybe an interplay of the Deadwood with live veins on the tree, particularly for talking about junipers size is something that’s also taken into consideration. In the past, everybody wanted large bonsai, but large bones are unwieldy. You can’t really move them around. And they’re actually very difficult to resell nowadays, at least at my nursery. So the focus is sort of shifted to medium and smaller material. But those trees are very rare. So it’s hard to find like a medium size or a shohin size, which is a small size, say, Rocky Mount Juniper, for example, and collect it and keep it alive. So from that perspective, those plants can actually be significantly more expensive than larger versions of the same species. But those are sort of the main things I think that folks are looking for.
Michael Canfield: I see. And I would imagine some listings would be like, absolutely. Some listeners might say, well, what are the conservation/moral issues, etc. Are around this? And I’m curious how you would respond if somebody asks you like, hey, is that cool? Maybe that’s not the right thing to do. I’m not necessarily saying that. How would you respond to that?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Hey, this is a pretty common thing that I get, particularly if I post a video, say, on YouTube mentioning that this tree that we’re talking about today was collected in, like, the Alps in Japan, or this tree was collected in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, for example. I will always get pushback from people like, you’re pillaging the land, you’re destroying the environment out there. You’re destroying these trees when you’re collecting them. So my response to that is, number one, like I said before, I only deal with people who are getting permission from either the Bureau of Land Management, for example, if it’s publicly owned land, or the owners of that land. And in some cases, I have friends who have purchased huge swaths of land, like in New Mexico, for example, just to collect the trees off of the land. And this is totally unusable land. It’s land that goes for like $800 an acre because you can’t do anything with it. And there are tens of thousands of collectible trees on these properties out there. So that’s the number one thing. The number two thing is that where these trees are being collected, these are very harsh environments, and that’s what’s creating all of the interesting movement and the dead wood and the character in these trees. So in these environments, these trees, they’re not thriving. They’re surviving and just barely surviving in most instances. So our goal when we collect something like that and turn it into a bonsai is to make that tree thrive and grow very quickly, put on a lot of growth, put on a lot of root growth, fertilizing it heavily, providing the right kind of water, not only in terms of the amount of water that’s given to the plants, but also making sure that the pH is just right for the plant in order to make that plant thrive and stay alive in perpetuity. So we’ve essentially given life to these plants that they did not have out in nature. So I’ll give you an example. Some of the species that we use here at my nursery, one in particular is called one seed Juniper, Juniper’s monosperma. Apparently out in, say, the Four Corners area of New Mexico, which is kind of right at about a 4500 ft. Elevation, the diameter of the trunks grows about one inch for every 85 years. It takes forever for them to grow. When we bring those trees back to my nursery and fertilize and water them properly, we’re putting on in terms of extension growth on these plants, sometimes twelve to 18 inches of extension growth on those plants, which means that the diameter of the trunks is going to blow up in probably like 185th of the time that it would have out in nature. So from that perspective, we’re focusing entirely on the health of the plant, because if those plants die, they’re no longer a bonsai and they’re essentially worthless in the bones. I world, you just have a piece of Deadwood at that point. So from that perspective, I don’t think there’s really much of a moral issue as long as you’re getting permission and as long as you’re not just ripping things out of the ground and getting, like a 10% success rate, which does happen. And I have dealt with collectors who were less than ethical in their collection methods, and a lot of those plants died afterwards. And I no longer work with those collectors. So have been able to weed those people out. In general, this is not a clear cut operation. Right? I mean, there are places where people do a lot of clear cutting for other lumber purposes, but you’re not just taking everyone, you’re choosing ones that are the small fraction that seem like they would actually be valuable. Right? Exactly. A lot of those guys that they’re going out collecting, like, say, in Wyoming, for example, sometimes they’ll spend an entire eight or ten hour day walking around and collect absolutely nothing, because not only are they looking for the best quality plant, but they’re also looking for the plant that has the highest likelihood of success after collection of actually surviving. So quite often those guys will start looking at the roots, kind of digging away at the stuff around the root system, and then they’ll find that a tap root runs 20ft in the opposite direction. They’ll then cover everything back up and leave that tree completely alone because they know if they cut that tap root, that tree is going to die. There’s no way it’s going to survive. So why kill a 500 year old plant just for a 10% likelihood chance that it might survive and you might make $10,000 on it, right? Yeah, that’s a problem. A lot of people see dollar signs, and this isn’t just a problem in the States. This has happened in Europe. It happened in Japan back in the 1910s, 1920s. Back in those days, Itoigawa Shimpaku, which is a cultivar or rather a variety of Juniper, Juniper’s Chinese that grows in the Niigata Prefecture of Japan. If you found as a collector a really good, beautiful example of an itwigawa and you collected it and sold it to the right person, you could be set for life financially back in those days. So there were people who were repelling down cliffsides and dying because they were slipping and falling, all because they wanted that one tree that they saw halfway down the mountainside that they knew if they could collect it, they’d be set for life and the families will be set for life. So you ended up with a lot of poorly collected trees, a lot of trees that died in Japan during the 19th century, probably up until about the war time or so. It slowed down a little bit after the war, and then by the 1980s, it was banned altogether, collecting in that area of Japan. So that gives a good sense of like for Bonsai professionals, et cetera, how you sort of go to the field, so to speak, whether it’s finding established trees or going to the find Yamadori, that’s one way of approaching nature. But I think a lot of the meaning of bonsai, from the bonsai professionals to people who buy them to people who like to make them, is that it allows you to approach nature without leaving even your backyard.
Michael Canfield: And one of the things I heard you say in an interview or a video was kind of describing, especially Japan, as being so crowded that you have this sort of bubble around yourself and you try to reach out of it sometimes, and it seems like both Japanese gardens and then also bonsai is a way for people to find an interaction with nature, et cetera. So I’m curious about how you, as someone who has spent a lot of time in Japan, also here intensively studying bonsai and doing it yourself and seeing people coming to it. How would you describe the ways in which this process of bonsai I writ large. How does it help people create meaning around nature? Like, what are the ways you see the benefits from those interactions?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Sure. Yeah. I think there are a few things here. I would say, if you want to talk about beginners getting into bonsai, one of the things that I’ve noticed when we have rank beginners come to my nursery here is that they gravitate towards the more naturalistic forms, like the forest planting, for example, or a rock planting where the tree looks like it’s along the coastline, for example, or overhanging a cliff. People really tend to gravitate towards that, and that’s not something that only I’ve noticed. But for example, my teacher’s, teacher Saburo Kato, who is a very famous bonsai artist who owned one of the oldest nurseries in Japan named Montein, up in Omaha near Tokyo. He recognized this back in the 1970s and early 80s when foreigners, for example, would come visit his nursery, they always gravitated towards the forest plantings and the rock planting. So that’s what he ended up specializing in, not because he wanted to sell those trees to those people, but he was more of an ambassador of the art and wanted to sell the idea of bonsai to people or promote the idea of bonsai to people as kind of, I guess from a therapeutic perspective partly, but also just sort of a connection to nature perspective. So he really focused on that aspect of bonsai art. So it’s kind of like if you live in a big city like Tokyo or New York, for example, there are parks there, not only because they make it look more beautiful, but because people need to. I mean, we come from nature, right? We evolved in the Plains, we evolved in nature. So getting into a park where you can get away from the concrete jungle around you and experience nature, there’s all sorts of research on this as well, that it has a calming effect on people. It sort of centers people to some degree. And I think bonsai can do the same thing for people as well. So a lot of folks in Japan in particular, it’s very crowded. So people are living in small apartments with maybe a small veranda or a balcony outside. So quite often people will buy shohin or small bonsai to keep on those balconies so that they can be around nature on a daily basis. Like when they come home from work, they can sit there and look at their trees or touch their trees or work on their trees and feel some sort of connection to nature. It makes you feel more human, I think.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the popularity of it around the world, and I think even people who aren’t into it, how they instantly seem to gravitate towards when they see it, seems to be a testament to the importance and meaning of it, which is a validation, I think, of what you do. All right. I want to be respectful of your time. Maybe I’ve got a three question speed round, short answers. First, how would you describe your style of bonsai if somebody asks, so what typifies beyond bonsai?
Bjorn Bjorholm: I would say highly refined. I would also say that my style has shifted from my time in Japan to being back in the States. I do things a little differently now. So in Japan, my teacher Fujika was really big on almost a clinically clean style of tree, almost overly refined, almost like plasticky type style, which if you go back and look at my work during that period, that’s how I styled trees. But when I came back to the States, I sort of softened my approach. So I would say that now I would sort of classify my work as refined but naturalistic. So there’s a softness to the quality of the branch structure as I build it out now on my trees, but still recognizable as my own.
Michael Canfield: Okay. Do plants gain value from the legacy of the people who have worked on them? For example, if I came to your nursery and bought one that you worked on, would it have value because you worked on it?
Bjorn Bjorholm: I would say so different artists are going to add different amounts of value to the trees. So, for example, in Japan, the number one guy, everybody in the bonsai world knows this individual. His name is Masajiko Kimura. He’s considered the magician of bonsai, pretty much everything that we do in terms of building modern coniferous bonsai. Those techniques were either created by or further developed by Mr. Kimura back in the 80s. If you go to his nursery and purchase a tree there and purchase the same tree from, say, Fujika Nursery, where I studied, the tree would probably be close to double or triple in value just because he laid his hands on the plant. Now I can’t do that with my plants here necessarily. But I do think that if someone buys a tree from me and they put it in an exhibition, there’s bragging rights there that they purchased a tree from me.
Michael Canfield: Yes. And not yet. Right. In the sense that those things can develop over time. Right. As some of these trees gain value that you’ve worked on. So that’s exciting to think about. All right, last short question. Do you wear a watch? I’m curious. Like, we’re interested in watches on this podcast. I’m curious if you wear one. And I have some ideas, some guesses of what you might wear if you had a watch or whatever. So what’s your relationship with wristwear? Bjorn Bjorholm: So I don’t actually wear a watch. I don’t even wear a wedding ring, actually, just because I work in the dirt so much that I don’t want to get those things dirty. But I have gotten interested in watches a little bit lately. I haven’t really dived deeply into that whole culture because I have a bit of an obsessive personality. And once I get into something, I end up spending way too much time and money on those things. So it kind of scares me a little bit to get involved in that. Watches are great for that, by the way. Right? Yeah. My biggest thing the last few months has been, like, vintage camera lenses from the 19s, 50s, 60s and 70s. And I built up a ridiculous collection in a short amount of time. So I’m kind of avoiding the watches. But that’s something that when we do go back to Japan in the future for our tours and whatnot and visit, I’d like to have a nice watch. It looks nice when you dress nice and walk around.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, they’re beautiful. I think there’s some overlap, especially with Japanese culture or whatever. And there are some really beautiful ones that I could imagine you wearing both in the garden there and then also certainly the Grand Seikos and stuff, the white Birch. And there’s some really beautiful watches that I could imagine you gravitating toward, not that I don’t get any kickbacks from companies here. I don’t know, just curiosity. They’re so beautiful and some aspects. So that was just a question I had where you are on that front. All right. So last thing. You’ve done a lot of videos. You’ve done a lot of work developing yourself. You’re at a particular place right now. I’m curious for listeners one, what do you see kind of in the future? Like, what are you working on kind of going forward? And then can you just tell us how do you mention the website a little bit, but how can people engage with what you’re doing, learn about you, understand, and also maybe even purchase some of your bone tie. Right. How do we get to know you better?
Bjorn Bjorholm: Sure. Yeah. So in terms of our focus at the nursery right now, bonsai you is our online learning bonsai platform Where we put up new demonstrations and do live Q and a sessions with our membership every month, multiple times a month. So we’re working on expanding that at the moment. It’s been a lot of fun putting that together. Like I mentioned, I’ve been collecting these vintage camera lenses. I use those things to film all of these episodes that we put together for Bonsai-U so it’s kind of a combination of hobbies there, but we’re working on expanding that, finding new information, new species to work with. We’re bringing in other guest artists who actually do videos on the platform as well. So that’s probably our biggest push at the moment. And coming up and not too long, we’re thinking about expanding the business to more of an overseas model as well. So I can’t talk too much about that at the moment, but that’s something that we’re looking at doing in the next four or five years here. And then in terms of if people want to check out my content or maybe get involved with bonsai, you or come and study at the nursery, best place to go is just bjornbjorholm.com or eisei-en.com you can find all of the information on there about all of those things. We’re also on YouTube. I think it’s YouTube. I believe it’s the tag there and on Instagram as well. It’s the same thing, so you can check us out on all of those different platforms.
Michael Canfield: Bjorn, thank you so much. It’s such a great honor and pleasure to have you on the podcast and for you to share with us the art and science, so to speak, of phone side and to help us understand how we can learn more about it. So thanks for joining us and good luck this season in the garden.
Bjorn Bjorholm: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
Michael Canfield: Thanks again, Bjorn, for sharing so much of his knowledge of bonsai with us. Our music credit today is Whiskey on the Mississippi By Kevin McLoyd Courtesy of Creative Commons Until our next shift. This is Michael Canfield, Thanking you for joining us On the Dogwatch.
