Tag Archive

This is the final post about the Korean Bunjae Museum in Seoul (Part 1) (Part 2). The following photos are from the largest green house on the site which was mainly filled with the trees belonging to the owner of the Nursery.

There were literally thousands and thousands of bonsai inside the huge green house.

A glimpse at some of the trees.

All the trees were sheltering out the winter under cover due to the low temperatures the area experiences. As a result the green house was quite cramped, In a strange way this was quite good as you really had to hunt around to look at all the tree.

One of the wings full of bonsai.

Throughout the collection there were many trees that were a little unusual. Some of these unusual characteristics were due to the fact that they were collected trees and others were grown in ways I was un familiar with.

An exposed root forest.

One such tree was this exposed root forest. I can’t remember seeing a tree like this before and as a result I spent a good amount of time in front of it soaking it up.

Some of the other trees were unusual due to their size, which in some cases was outright huge!

A massive hornbeam.

I couldn’t help but wonder how much time it must take to maintain a collection of this size.

A few pics of some more of the tree are below.

For those travelling through Seoul or thinking of visiting i can thoroughly recommend it. I would actually love to come back some time not in the heart of winter to see the trees in leaf and outside the green houses on display. The day we visited the owner of the nursery was not around but instead his daughter was looking after things.

She had just graduated from a Bonsai University degree and spoke near perfect english. She had many ideas for how she would like to promote bonsai within Korea in the future and I am sure she will achieve them.

So if you are ever in Korea I think a trip to the Korean Bunjae Museum is well worth the effort.

It’s been a busy few weeks so I apologise for the lack of posts. Hopefully I can post a bit more regularly now.

This post I will share a few more photos from the Korean Bunjae Museum. You can see in my earlier post, some of the amazing man-made stones that were on the outside of the massive green houses in which the bonsai were sheltering from the sub-zero winter chill. In this post we will explore one of those green houses.

Inside the green house.

What was interesting about this nursery was how it was run. In the Japanese nurseries I have visited the trees that were living within the nursery either belonged to the nurseryman or a customer but nearly all the work was done on the trees by the professional nurseryman.

Here in the Korean Bunjae Museum, hobby growers could rent bench space and grow their trees as they liked while enjoying the luxuries of a nursery such as misted green houses, regular watering, and a professional grower on site to call on for advice and or lessons etc. It seemed like a really good system and one I could see working well at other places. To imagine the ease at which you could take holidays without having to organise someone to water or without having to move the collection to a friends backyard makes this nurseries system seem like a great idea.

Now just because the growers in this green house were hobby growers it didn’t mean the trees were of a sub standard level. In fact there was a whole range of standards of trees many of which were very high leveled.

Some amazing Nebari!

The tree above was one of the first to catch my eye with its excellent root spread. I am sure that most of those roots will fuse into a solid plate at some stage but for now the individual roots look amazing!

Thee tree in the round.

And I guess I couldn’t make post about a Korean bonsai nursery without having a picture of a Korean Hornbeam.

A nice hornbeam.

A more feminine hornbeam.

There was also no shortage of junipers.

Juniper

What was particularly interesting was all the raw material that was growing between the more finished bonsai.

My wife posing with a large hornbeam in-the-making

A trident maple (I think, maybe a korean maple of some type?) with a thread graft.

A few more pics and in the gallery below.

The next post will be on the second, larger green house which is where the Korean Bunjae Museum collection was sheltering out the winter. It was a huge space, packed with trees so stay tuned.

During our recent stay in Japan we managed to get a couple of cheap flight / accomodation packages so we could spend a few days in Seoul. The purpose of the trip was for my wife to stock up on Korean cosmetics  (Korea is a shopping mecca for the Japanese) but I managed to squeeze in a quick visit to one of the local nurseries, The Korean Bunjae Museum.

The Korean Bunjae Museum

This visit was my first experience with korean bonsai so I wasnt sure what to expect. What I will be covering in this post is what initially grabbed my attention.

We visited in the middle of winter. Most of the lakes in the surrounding parks had frozen and the top daytime temperatures were not even making it above freezing. When we first entered the nursery I wasn’t sure we were at the right place. I could hardly see any bonsai! We soon learnt that the whole collection was sheltering in huge greenhouses for the winter but that’s a whole other post.

What caught my eye was some huge rocks with trees planted upon them that were assumingly too big to be moved inside for the winter.

One of the massive rocks.

After spending some time with the owners daughter she explained that the rocks were actually all man-made by a close friend of her fathers. Now I don’t know about you but I think these are some of the best fake rocks I have ever seen! Even up close I couldn’t tell they were not natural.

Another rock and planting.

An upright rock with a small pine perched a top.

This last rock was my favorite. It was large rock that had a great little hornbeam forest on top of it. It made me wonder just how difficult it must be to trim it and keep it looking so good.

A small forest on top of one of the rocks.

A close up of the forest.

I will have a few more posts from this nursery as it was full of interesting trees and was run quite differently to the Japanese nurseries I was familiar with so stay tuned.

It is well worth a visit if you are ever in Korea. Their web page can be found HERE and their facebook page can be found HERE