A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
washingtonpost.com
A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#2I've always thought the culture and heritage surrounding bonsai is amazing. I was in a local bonsai club when I was younger and the patience required to produce a really great tree is something to be respected. Sometimes the trees will just die for no discernible reason and you just have to start over after months or years of work. Some of the oldest trees are estimated to be over 1000 years old and have been passed through generations of care takers.
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#3I've always thought the culture and heritage surrounding bonsai is amazing. I was in a local bonsai club when I was younger and the patience required to produce a really great tree is something to be respected. Sometimes the trees will just die for no discernible reason and you just have to start over after months or years of work. Some of the oldest trees are estimated to be over 1000 years old and have been passed…
I too am fascinated with bonsai. It's not only aesthetically pleasing, but also really interesting from a purely biological perspective.
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#4I've been getting into bonsai also. If anyone reading this wants to do a meetup, it'd be fun to get together with tech bonsai people in Portland.
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#5I've always thought the culture and heritage surrounding bonsai is amazing. I was in a local bonsai club when I was younger and the patience required to produce a really great tree is something to be respected. Sometimes the trees will just die for no discernible reason and you just have to start over after months or years of work. Some of the oldest trees are estimated to be over 1000 years old and have been passed…
I know the feeling, one of my favourite tree just died in spring; it was all fine during the winter, and just died like that. 5 years of work, and p00f!
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#6Since it was so close to the blast, wouldn't it still be radioactive, like Marie Curie's journals?
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#7I've been getting into bonsai also. If anyone reading this wants to do a meetup, it'd be fun to get together with tech bonsai people in Portland.
Why not just get together with tech folks over tech, and bonsai people over bonsai, and cross-pollinate your life a bit? :)
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#8I've always thought the culture and heritage surrounding bonsai is amazing. I was in a local bonsai club when I was younger and the patience required to produce a really great tree is something to be respected. Sometimes the trees will just die for no discernible reason and you just have to start over after months or years of work. Some of the oldest trees are estimated to be over 1000 years old and have been passed…
I too am fascinated with bonsai. It's not only aesthetically pleasing, but also really interesting from a purely biological perspective.
I had a mentor of sorts who was this retired engineer who went to MIT and he gave me the advice that bonsai is one half art, one half biology, one half philosophy. This adds up to over 100% obviously but the point was that to be good at bonsai you needed to have at least two of those things down pat. The biology is interesting, (just kind of stream of thought here) although I was pretty young at the time I remember there being a great deal of interest in soil mixes, and special types of fertilizer which allow the tree to be healthy while also staying small. I was also taught to think of the root structure as a mirror of the visible part of the tree, and in some ways more important than the parts that you typically see. You can recover a tree from pruning its branches but if you over prune the roots it will likely die, similarly you can't let the roots overgrow because they will get over crowded in the small pots. Also certain species of tree with different root structures required differently shaped pots. Grafts were common, sometimes you might desire a tree that does not grow well in pots but you could achieve the same thing by grafting a branch of one species onto the root stock of another but this was difficult to do because you can end up with ugly scars or a contrast between the two types of bark. Another thing I remember being interesting is that some fruiting trees will produce miniature fruits, or miniature flowers.
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#9I've been getting into bonsai also. If anyone reading this wants to do a meetup, it'd be fun to get together with tech bonsai people in Portland.
Why not just get together with tech folks over tech, and bonsai people over bonsai, and cross-pollinate your life a bit? :)
Umm .. wouldn't that be not cross-polinating?
Re: A 390-year-old bonsai tree survived an atomic bomb
#10I think the value of this tree is in the idea that one day America might give it back to Japan as an act of peace, since it is clearly a very special organism and the value of the act would truly communicate the idea of transcending the causes of hostility. Exchanging such a beautiful life form as an act of peace would surely be the penultimate act of bonsai...