Until the 1970s, when the Chinese government began codifying five regional schools of penjing, each with its own approach to styling local species through cutting, wiring or pinching, there were few rules: Early guides published in the 16th and 17th centuries suggested that practitioners should attempt to imitate values like vigor and austerity represented in classical landscape painting, says Phillip E. Penjing, as it developed over the centuries, didn’t idealize nature but rather portrayed - or, as some bonsai scholars suggest, exaggerated - its strange, expansive beauty. By that point, Chinese gardeners had likely been creating potted landscapes, or penjing (“potted scenery”), for hundreds of years, bringing nature into the homes of political elites, painters and calligraphers. THE PRACTICE OF miniaturizing plants is thought to have come to Japan from China sometime around the seventh century, when the two countries formally established diplomatic ties. In his absence, the tree had grown scraggly, its wooden container rotted and its roots broken through into the soil below. Toichi Domoto returned to his nursery, which had been left in the care of an employee, and began the long process of restoring his family’s prized maple. After the war, when the camps were closed, those practitioners started local clubs as private spaces for Japanese American hobbyists, eventually welcoming a broader public fascinated by Japanese aesthetics. In the camps, bonsai artists - those forced, like the Domotos, to give up their collections - made trees and flowers from paper and wire, makeshift manifestations of their own heartbreak. ![]() When the Domotos lost their property - which once spanned 48 acres - during the Depression, Kanetaro’s eldest son, Toichi, brought the trident maple to his own nursery in nearby Hayward, but by 1942 the family was imprisoned at Colorado’s Amache internment camp. When the exposition ended, the maple was purchased by Kanetaro Domoto, a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Oakland, Calif., in the 1880s and co-founded with his brothers what would soon become the largest Japanese-owned plant nursery in the country. Like most bonsai from that time, the maple expressed an ageless ideal of the natural world wrested into equilibrium. Evenly spaced branches reached out from a trunk twisted into gentle contrapposto, its clusters of spring green foliage suggesting the outline of an isosceles triangle. More than a century old, the tree was an exemplar of the Imperial style, a type of bonsai developed for shoguns and feudal lords and named after the Imperial court during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, an era of cultural transformation that arose following the country’s 214-year-long period of isolation. in Japan arrived in the port of San Francisco, among them a seven-foot-tall trident maple destined for the Japanese Pavilion at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to be held two years later. ![]() IN 1913, A shipment of plants from the Yokohama Nursery Co.
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