When John Weathers retired and moved to Columbus in 2007, he looked around for something to fill his time. After remodeling his home for about a year, he tried his hand at fishing. After a year of that, he was bored.
That’s when he took up bonsai. Now, 10 years later, Weathers is in bonsai for the long haul, which is good.
“You have to have patience,” Weathers said as he showed some of his 45 bonsai trees during Thursday’s Columbus Exchange Club Luncheon. “It takes about five years to style a tree and I have friends who have had trees for 25, 30 years and they still feel they aren’t what they want them to be.”
Bonsai, translated from Japanese to English, is “tree in pot,” a combination of horticulture and art that dramatically reduces the scale of a tree while shaping the tree according the artist’s vision.
Bonsai dates back more than 3,000 years in China and was introduced to Japan in the ninth century. After World War II, bonsai migrated to the U.S.
Weathers, who spent 10 years in Japan with the Navy, said when he was looking for a new hobby, he remembered some of the bonsai trees in Japan.
“I was talking to one person and I asked him how old a tree was,” Weathers said. “He said he didn’t know, but that his grandfather had gotten it from his grandfather. So that tree was easily 150 years old.”
For Weathers, bonsai is a daily diversion of watering, clipping with small scissors, and shaping the trees using wire.
His trees are all Japanese pine, maple and elm.
A member of the Alabama Bonsai Society in Birmingham, Weathers said enthusiasts meet regularly to exchange ideas and expertise.
It’s pretty much a trial and error proposition.
“Ask anyone who has grown bonsai trees for any length of time and they’ll tell you they wind up being a serial tree murderer,” he said.
To avoid that, Weathers regularly attends workshops — including an event in Memphis that draws more than 250 bonsai growers each year. It’s not only a way to bond around a common interest, it’s a way for attendees to improve their bonsai skills.
“Really, you have to know people who can help you,” he said. “You can read about it in a book, but when you have a question, you need to have somebody around who can answer them.”
One of the more common mistakes — understandable given that they are grown in small pots and are the size of small house plants — is to treat them like plants.
“They’re trees,” he said. “If you bring them in the house for any length of time, they’re going to die. You have to remember that they’re trees.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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