Handheld Empires

The ancient Japanese art of bonsai, transplanted in Louisiana

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Nearly two thousand years ago, in a cloistered palace in Han Dynasty China, an emperor had grown tired of his stone walls and parapets. Every day he looked out over the valley and witnessed the plums and magnolias blooming over the grasslands, and regretted that he could not live among them as an ordinary subject. So, calling his gardeners to his side, he asked them to create in his palace an empire in miniature. He wanted every hill in his dominion replicated into forms small enough to carry in the palms of his hands; every lake able to be filled with water from a tea cup, and each tree arranged into a tiny continent he could admire from a god’s-eye view.   

Or at least that’s one version of events. Like the exact date of the artform’s migration from China to Japan under the influence of Zen Buddhism, the mythology behind the origin of bonsai—which literally translates into “planted in a container”—is a dainty memory, imprecise and lovely. For Evan Pardue, nursery manager of Underhill Bonsai in Folsom, Louisiana, the practice of miniaturizing nature’s grandest habitants has always been a way of capturing the aesthetic of history, both personal and natural.

“I had a small-town childhood,” said Pardue, a native of the Ponchatoula area. “There weren’t a lot of neighborhoods nearby, or much to do, so I spent a lot of time exploring the woods and being in nature.”

When this love of the outdoors translated into a career in bonsai, Pardue isn’t totally sure. 

“I did attend art school at Southeastern for a period of time,” said Pardue, who grew up in a family of blue-collared craftspeople and musicians. “But I think a lot of Americans’ first memory of bonsai comes from watching Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, and the influence that had over people.”

The art of bonsai requires a bit more than perfunctory viewings of endlessly quotable ‘80s films, however, and when Pardue first began curating the seedlings, cuttings, or small trees to prune into miniatures, he admits there were a few casualties along the way.

“It’s like a painter drafting multiple pieces and scrapping them over and over again until they get it right,” he said. “Eventually you learn that bonsai is more of a lifestyle. It has to become part of your daily routine—waking up every day to check on water levels, or temperature, or planning out your schedule. When I was first starting out, I was juggling that learning process between a normal job and trying to go to school, without much extra money in my pocket, so I usually just sourced plants from nearby woodlines and riverbanks for convenience.”

Because of those early curations from Louisiana’s landscapes, Pardue takes special interest in a subset of bonsai: yamadori, which loosely means “gathering plants from the wild.” This month, he’ll teach a series of classes at Hilltop Arboretum detailing the ways amateur gardeners and bonsai hobbyists can use cuttings from native trees in their own backyards to build a little empire of their own. He will also teach the art of penjing, or miniature landscape art, often referred to as the Chinese origin—remember the emperor?—of bonsai. Apart from the stereotypical ceramic pots or isolated individual plantings of traditional bonsai, students will instead learn how to recreate small forests and topographies on slabs of reclaimed cypress from Louisiana marshes, a wood whose natural grain and texture can imitate the visual flair of ponds and rivers.

“Native plants will obviously grow better in Louisiana than an imported plant,” said Pardue. “Since it’s already suited to the environment, it makes it easier to get into a routine and learn to adjust to what the plant wants and needs before forcing what you want out of it. Those are the basic techniques you have to learn before you start getting into the art or design of the tree.”

In fact, the innate differences between native trees in different parts of the world have inspired different regional aesthetics in bonsai and penjing. People familiar with The Karate Kid might recognize the traditional Japanese aesthetic, for example, but a traveler to Germany might encounter a very different design style, as would someone in the Philippines, Australia, or Great Britain. 

“America is really in the beginning stages of conceptualizing an idea of how to design bonsai,” said Pardue. “There have been people who have made a mark on bonsai in South Louisiana before, but I feel lucky to be able to tease out and develop new designs as the practice becomes more prominent here. It’s always expanding.”

Like an artist viewing a Rembrandt or a composer learning from Mozart’s Requiem, Pardue recommends that his students take time to observe trees in nature and study their innate growth patterns. 

“Every tree has what’s called a flow growth pattern, which will direct the general shape of its physiology,” said Pardue. “I like to put it this way: with bonsai, we’re not necessarily controlling the tree. The tree is showing us what it wants to do. We’re just guiding it.”

Even so, one of the marks of a great bonsai artist—as well as one of the concepts which produces such different aesthetics around the world—is the ability to create a tree whose form flows in unpredictable ways. Pardue suggests envisioning a feature on a tree that you really enjoy, or perhaps a particular movement or line, and emphasizing those individualities in your ultimate design.

“Try to make a tree that would surprise you if you were to stumble across it in nature,” he said. 

Sometimes, though, a familiar sight can be just as inspiring.

“Some of my bonsai were originally collected from the property near where I grew up, in memory of things I saw when I was younger,” said Pardue. “Back then, a lot of trees looked like towers to me. Now I can recapture the feeling of them in a new way. They really do tell stories for me.”

This dive into the imagination, he said, is why the action of bonsai-making resembles a meditative state. It could also be referred to as a type of folk art, a brand often considered an “outsider art”—apart from the world of academia, where bonsai has little presence.

“It’s especially suited to Louisiana folk art,” said Pardue. “When you think about it, there are already a lot of simplistic lines and negative space in Louisiana landscapes that naturally suit themselves to the Japanese aesthetic.”

And while our ponds might be filled with catfish instead of koi, and our fields with the fog of lowlands instead of Mount Fuji mist, anyone can sense the fantasy in names like Blood River, Trefuncte, or Lizard Creek. Who knows? With the recent crowning of Mardi Gras kings, queens, squires, and maids, it might be high time for Louisianans to consider their kingdoms of maple and moss—the perfect progenitors for little empires of the yard. h

underhillbonsai.com

Learn more about Pardue’s upcoming workshops at lsu.edu/hilltop.