Page 19 - Ebook bonsai for beginner

Chinese Chan Buddhism also was imported and became Zen Buddhism

in Japan. Finding beauty in severe austerity, Zen monks – with less land
forms as a model -- developed their tray landscapes along certain lines
so that a single tree in a pot could represent the universe. The Japanese
pots were generally deeper than those from the mainland, and the
resulting gardening form was called hachi-no-ki, literally, the bowl’s tree.
A folktale from the late 1300s, about an impoverished samurai who

sacrificed his last three dwarf potted trees to provide warmth for a
travelling monk on a cold winter night, became a popular Noh theatre
play, and images from the story would be depicted in a number of media
forms, including woodblock prints, through the centuries.

Everyone from the military leader shoguns to ordinary peasant people
grew some form of tree or azalea in a pot or abalone shell. By the late
eighteenth century a show for traditional pine dwarf potted trees was
begun to be held annually in the capital city of Kyoto. Connoisseurs from

five provinces and the neighboring areas would bring one or two plants
each to the show in order to submit them to the visitors for ranking or
judging. The town of Takamatsu (home of Kinashi Bonsai village) was
already growing fields of partly-shaped dwarf pines for a major source of
income.

Different sizes and styles were developed over the next century; catalogs
and books about the trees, tools, and pots were published; some early
formal shows were held. Copper and iron wire replaced hemp fibers for
shaping the trees. Containers mass-produced in China were made to

Japanese specifications and the number of hobbyists grew.
Following the Great Kanto Earthquake which devastated the Tokyo area
in 1923, a group of thirty families of professional growers resettled twenty

miles away in Omiya and set up what would become the center of
Japanese Bonsai culture; Omiya Bonsai village. In the 1930s as formal
displays of Bonsai became recognized, an official annual show was
allowed at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.