Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection
Encyclopedia
The Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection at the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
is one of the premier collections of bonsai
in the United States
and includes a Hinoki Cypress
over 250 years old.
The Bonsai Pavilion where the trees are housed are part of the complex of buildings known as the Dana Greenhouses. The collection is on display from mid-April to the end of October. As the bonsai trees are deciduous
, they are held in cold storage
at temperatures slightly above freezing throughout the winter.
had a long interest in the horticulture
of Japan
. He brought two dwarf maple
s back from his first trip to Japan in 1889. In 1907, he and his wife Isabel Weld Perkins
built a Japanese garden
at Weld (now Larz Anderson Park
). But it was in 1913, while Larz Anderson was in Japan as U.S. Ambassador
, that the Andersons became truly enraptured with bonsai. He wrote:
from 1901 to 1922 are impressive documents, beautifully illustrated with colored plates, line drawing
s, and photograph
s. In a section titled "Dwarf Trees Growing in Jardinieres" the catalogs show pictures of ancient specimens of Hinoki Cypress similar to those that are now part of the collection. They are captioned "Relics of the Tokugawa Era
”.
The price Anderson paid for his plants is unknown, but the 1913-1914 edition of the catalog lists prices ranging from one to fifty dollars "in U.S. gold". When the Andersons returned to the US about a month later, they brought these bonsai with them and housed them at Weld.
. He later returned to Japan and became a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University
.
. When that same organization sponsored a show of chrysanthemums and Japanese dwarf trees in 1933, the Andersons participated again. On this occasion, House Beautiful
magazine interviewed Rainosuke Awano and showed photographs of the collection. The author described the bonsai with heavy metaphor:
along with the funds necessary to build a shade house for their display. When she died in 1948, the remaining nine plants in her possession were donated to the Arboretum including an 80-year-old Hinoki Cypress that had been given to the Andersons by the Imperial Household
shortly before they left Japan for the last time.
's gift to the Andersons.
-block cold storage for winter protection. The latter maintains temperatures between 33 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit
. Formerly, the bonsai had been placed in covered pits and cold frames for the winter. This practice compromised the health of the plants and the consequent freezing of the rootballs cracked many of the original Japanese containers.
Under Derderian's care, the remaining portion of the collection was revitalized. When she resigned in 1984, Peter Del Tredici
having worked as her apprentice since 1979, became the new curator. In recent years Colin Lewis, a noted bonsai artist and author, has been working on the collection. The health and aesthetic value of the collection is improving under his care.
weekend 1986. Six plants were stolen, including three Japanese Maples that were part of the original Larz Anderson Collection. Prompted by this disaster, the Arnold Arboretum renovated the bonsai house. Deteriorating redwood planks were replaced with sturdy douglas fir. New doors allowed visitors an unobstructed view of the collection and a new security system was installed.
The Hinoki Cypress seem to be especially hardy; 7 of the 10 original plants are still alive. According to Anderson's records, the oldest of these Hinoki Cypress was started in 1737.
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
Jamaica Plain is a historic neighborhood of in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded by Boston Puritans seeking farm land to the south, it was originally part of the city of Roxbury...
is one of the premier collections of bonsai
Bonsai
is a Japanese art form using miniature trees grown in containers. Similar practices exist in other cultures, including the Chinese tradition of penjing from which the art originated, and the miniature living landscapes of Vietnamese hòn non bộ...
in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and includes a Hinoki Cypress
Chamaecyparis obtusa
Chamaecyparis obtusa is a species of cypress native to central Japan.It is a slow-growing tree which grows to 35 m tall with a trunk up to 1 m in diameter. The bark is dark red-brown...
over 250 years old.
The Bonsai Pavilion where the trees are housed are part of the complex of buildings known as the Dana Greenhouses. The collection is on display from mid-April to the end of October. As the bonsai trees are deciduous
Deciduous
Deciduous means "falling off at maturity" or "tending to fall off", and is typically used in reference to trees or shrubs that lose their leaves seasonally, and to the shedding of other plant structures such as petals after flowering or fruit when ripe...
, they are held in cold storage
Refrigeration
Refrigeration is a process in which work is done to move heat from one location to another. This work is traditionally done by mechanical work, but can also be done by magnetism, laser or other means...
at temperatures slightly above freezing throughout the winter.
Larz and Isabel
Larz AndersonLarz Anderson
Larz Anderson III was a wealthy American businessman and diplomat who briefly served as U.S. Ambassador to Japan ....
had a long interest in the horticulture
Horticulture
Horticulture is the industry and science of plant cultivation including the process of preparing soil for the planting of seeds, tubers, or cuttings. Horticulturists work and conduct research in the disciplines of plant propagation and cultivation, crop production, plant breeding and genetic...
of Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
. He brought two dwarf maple
Maple
Acer is a genus of trees or shrubs commonly known as maple.Maples are variously classified in a family of their own, the Aceraceae, or together with the Hippocastanaceae included in the family Sapindaceae. Modern classifications, including the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group system, favour inclusion in...
s back from his first trip to Japan in 1889. In 1907, he and his wife Isabel Weld Perkins
Isabel Weld Perkins
Isabel Weld Perkins , mostly known as Isabel Anderson or Mrs. Larz Anderson after her marriage, was a Boston-area heiress and author who left a legacy to the public that includes a park and two museums. She is interred in the St...
built a Japanese garden
Japanese garden
, that is, gardens in traditional Japanese style, can be found at private homes, in neighborhood or city parks, and at historical landmarks such as Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and old castles....
at Weld (now Larz Anderson Park
Larz Anderson Park
Larz Anderson Park is a wooded, landscaped, and waterscaped parkland in Brookline, Massachusetts that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The southwest corner of the park is in Boston...
). But it was in 1913, while Larz Anderson was in Japan as U.S. Ambassador
Ambassador
An ambassador is the highest ranking diplomat who represents a nation and is usually accredited to a foreign sovereign or government, or to an international organization....
, that the Andersons became truly enraptured with bonsai. He wrote:
"About us were dwarf trees of fantastic shape and stunted plum in fragrant bloom, white and pink, and gnarled treeTreeA tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to...
s hundreds of years old with branches blossoming out of seemingly dead trunks in pots of beautiful form and color. Isabel and I stopped so long in this little fairy place that we had to drive like the dickens through the congested streets of endless villages to YokohamaYokohamais the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu...
...in time for one o'clock luncheon."
Yokohama Nursery
The Andersons purchased 40 bonsai from the Yokohama Nursery Company. The company's catalogsMail order
Mail order is a term which describes the buying of goods or services by mail delivery. The buyer places an order for the desired products with the merchant through some remote method such as through a telephone call or web site. Then, the products are delivered to the customer...
from 1901 to 1922 are impressive documents, beautifully illustrated with colored plates, line drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
s, and photograph
Photograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
s. In a section titled "Dwarf Trees Growing in Jardinieres" the catalogs show pictures of ancient specimens of Hinoki Cypress similar to those that are now part of the collection. They are captioned "Relics of the Tokugawa Era
Edo period
The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....
”.
The price Anderson paid for his plants is unknown, but the 1913-1914 edition of the catalog lists prices ranging from one to fifty dollars "in U.S. gold". When the Andersons returned to the US about a month later, they brought these bonsai with them and housed them at Weld.
Rainosuke Awano
At that time, knowledge of how to care for bonsai did not exist among Americans. Instead, the Andersons hired a succession of skilled Japanese gardeners. The most famous of these was Rainosuke Awano, a young man who maintained the collection while studying for his doctorate in philosophy at Columbia UniversityColumbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. He later returned to Japan and became a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University
Kwansei Gakuin University
, colloquially abbreviated to , is a non-denominational Christian private and coeducational university located in Nishinomiya, Sanda, Osaka City, and Tokyo, Japan....
.
Public display
On at least two occasions the Andersons displayed their bonsai collection to the public display. They first displayed their new collection at the 1916 spring flower show of the Massachusetts Horticultural SocietyMassachusetts Horticultural Society
The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, sometimes abbreviated to MassHort, is an American horticultural society based in Massachusetts. It describes itself as the oldest, formally-organized horticultural institution in the United States...
. When that same organization sponsored a show of chrysanthemums and Japanese dwarf trees in 1933, the Andersons participated again. On this occasion, House Beautiful
House Beautiful
House Beautiful is an interior decorating magazine that focuses on decorating and the domestic arts. First published in 1896, it is currently published by the Hearst Corporation, who purchased it in 1934...
magazine interviewed Rainosuke Awano and showed photographs of the collection. The author described the bonsai with heavy metaphor:
"It seems unholy to move such venerable patriarchs from the land where they have lived so long in meditation and repose. But they are here, nevertheless, in this country which was a wilderness when they and their art had reached a high degree of elegance and culture. And on the wide green terrace before the stately Brookline home of Mr. Larz Anderson, noted statesman and scholar, these noble trees, samurai of their realm, seem quite at home. That may be because adaptability is a quality of the nobly born.
The donation
After Larz died in 1937, Isabel donated thirty of these miniature trees to the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
along with the funds necessary to build a shade house for their display. When she died in 1948, the remaining nine plants in her possession were donated to the Arboretum including an 80-year-old Hinoki Cypress that had been given to the Andersons by the Imperial Household
Imperial House of Japan
The , also referred to as the Imperial Family or the Yamato Dynasty, comprises those members of the extended family of the reigning Emperor of Japan who undertake official and public duties. Under the present Constitution of Japan, the emperor is the symbol of the state and unity of the people...
shortly before they left Japan for the last time.
Decline
Arboretum staff did their best given their limited knowledge of the art of bonsai, but the Larz Anderson Collection suffered from the lack of expert skills needed to keep the fragile trees healthy. The practice of annually forcing them into early growth for the spring flower show of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society contributed the collection's decline. By 1962, 27 of the original 39 bonsai survived. Among those that perished was the Hinoki Cypress that had been HirohitoHirohito
, posthumously in Japan officially called Emperor Shōwa or , was the 124th Emperor of Japan according to the traditional order, reigning from December 25, 1926, until his death in 1989. Although better known outside of Japan by his personal name Hirohito, in Japan he is now referred to...
's gift to the Andersons.
Dana Greenhouses
The 1962 construction of the Charles Stratton Dana Greenhouses was of benefit to the collection. This facility includes a hexagonal, redwood lath house to display the collection during the growing season and a concreteConcrete
Concrete is a composite construction material, composed of cement and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate , water and chemical admixtures.The word concrete comes from the Latin word...
-block cold storage for winter protection. The latter maintains temperatures between 33 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit
Fahrenheit
Fahrenheit is the temperature scale proposed in 1724 by, and named after, the German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit . Within this scale, the freezing of water into ice is defined at 32 degrees, while the boiling point of water is defined to be 212 degrees...
. Formerly, the bonsai had been placed in covered pits and cold frames for the winter. This practice compromised the health of the plants and the consequent freezing of the rootballs cracked many of the original Japanese containers.
New expertise
In 1969 the bonsai again came under the care of a true expert. Constance "Connie" Derderian had been teaching courses in bonsai at the Arboretum for several years prior to her appointment. She describes:"Perhaps because I was the only Bostonian who, for almost ten years, had steadily pursued the study of bonsai in the United States and in Japan, in 1969, through the efforts of Mr. Alfred Fordham, Dr. Donald Wyman asked me to repot the Anderson collection of bonsai. I did and began a program to renew the vigor and beauty of these venerable trees. Dr. Richard A. Howard, director, pleased with the initial effort, had me appointed Honorary Curator of the Bonsai Collection."
Under Derderian's care, the remaining portion of the collection was revitalized. When she resigned in 1984, Peter Del Tredici
Peter Del Tredici
Peter Del Tredici is an American botanist and author. He is a senior research scientist at Arnold Arboretum and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design...
having worked as her apprentice since 1979, became the new curator. In recent years Colin Lewis, a noted bonsai artist and author, has been working on the collection. The health and aesthetic value of the collection is improving under his care.
Theft
The bonsai house was broken into over Columbus DayColumbus Day
Many countries in the New World and elsewhere celebrate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, which occurred on October 12, 1492, as an official holiday...
weekend 1986. Six plants were stolen, including three Japanese Maples that were part of the original Larz Anderson Collection. Prompted by this disaster, the Arnold Arboretum renovated the bonsai house. Deteriorating redwood planks were replaced with sturdy douglas fir. New doors allowed visitors an unobstructed view of the collection and a new security system was installed.
Extant specimens
15 plants remain of the original 39 which the Andersons donated:- 7 Hinoki Cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa)
- 4 Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum)
- 1 Trident Maple (Acer buergerianum)
- 1 Higan CherryCherryThe cherry is the fruit of many plants of the genus Prunus, and is a fleshy stone fruit. The cherry fruits of commerce are usually obtained from a limited number of species, including especially cultivars of the wild cherry, Prunus avium....
(Prunus subhirtella) - 1 Sawara Cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera 'Squarrosa')
- 1 Japanese White PineJapanese White PineThe Japanese White Pine is a pine in the white pine group, Pinus subgenus Strobus, native to Japan. It is also known as the Japanese Five Needle Pine ....
(Pinus parviflora)
The Hinoki Cypress seem to be especially hardy; 7 of the 10 original plants are still alive. According to Anderson's records, the oldest of these Hinoki Cypress was started in 1737.