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At what point does nature stop being natural? Can we nurture nature to be natural?

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately (perhaps too much) and somewhere along the line, I started to think about the idea of nature and ‘looking natural’ in relation to bonsai.

I find the idea of striving to ‘be natural’ in bonsai ironic and somewhat funny as just about everything we do in bonsai is artificial, manipulated and controlled. In fact, if we put a tree in a pot and let ‘nature’ do it’s thing, it grows into something that usually isn’t accepted as bonsai.

Then what is the aim of bonsai? What are we trying to represent?

Most people I talk to are trying to represent a tree when they are considering styling a bonsai. But there is inherent problems with replicating full sizes trees in a shrunk down form.

Making a shrunk down, 100% accurate scale model of a tree is an impossible task to achieve with living plant material. You simply cannot recreate most of a full sized tree’s detail in miniature.

So even when attempting to make a scale model in bonsai, a certain level of approximation or abstraction has to be employed which pushes the end product away from it’s natural inspiration.

What is an acceptable level of abstraction or approximation?

Whether consciously or unconsciously, we make these abstraction decisions when designing bonsai. We decide what characteristics we believe represent a certain tree or species, or use what the collective unconscious holds as an archetypal symbol of a tree (or bonsai) and use it in our designs. This of course can shift culturally and may vary across the world as peoples’ experience of different climates, ecosystems and their relationship with the world around them varies.

So what natural bonsai is, is actually what humanity has deemed to be natural.

‘Natural’ as an idea or construct is a man-made construct in the first instance.

So then are all the results of natural processes ‘natural’ by definition? And following on from that thought, is nature what we are striving to recreate in the first place?

Is it not more interesting to look at bonsai as human kind’s relationship with the natural world?

Humans experience of the world is a limited one. Our brains, eyes and ears filter out a whole range of information that is out there in the world around us.

We cant see the infrared spectrum, hear certain frequencies or smell in the way other animals can. By default our experience of nature is not the full picture.

Depending on the person that is viewing the world around them, different elements or areas will become more prominent depending on their interpretation.

A simple example of this might be asking two people to pick a single element that represents a forest in their minds. Depending on the person’s previous experiences and knowledge you may get one person thinking of a dense green canopy over head with another focusing on a tight rhythm or collection of trunks.

Another might be one individual noticing hundreds of tiny mushrooms on the forest floor as the next person walk past oblivious to their existence.

When we are designing bonsai we use this limited window that we look through to make choices, meaning that the decisions that are made, the abstractions, the areas of focus etc are all based from a human perspective and say more about the person that has created the bonsai than about the world it is trying to represent.

So how do you see the world around you? Have you ever stopped to think about how your interpretation of the world differs from someone else?

Are you trying to represent nature in your bonsai? Or something else?

Me, I’m not too concerned with representing scaled down trees or trying to replicate ‘nature’.

I don’t even mind if a species of bonsai doesn’t look like that same species in the wild. (a topic for another day)

Over my bonsai growing experience thus far I have enjoyed unpicking how I see the world, figuring out what i’m drawn to and what interests me.

I’m not interested in the perfect average example of a species. I like the outliers. I like the weird and wonderful, and I think that flows through into the types of bonsai I like to look at and aspire to grow.

I’ll end this rambling with a favourite tree not far from my home that has featured on the blog before. Nature can sure make some un-natural forms!