Wild Bonsai 29*
Twenty-ninth in the series ‘Wild Bonsai’, this tree is thirty-eight inches (1.0m) in height and perhaps 300 years old.
'Wild Bonsai' is a numbered collection of photos of naturally occurring bristlecones (p. longaeva) generally less than five feet in height (1.5m) and - as nearly as I can estimate - between fifty and five-hundred years old - some much older. Most will have sprouted and survived in tiny cracks and crevices or miniature basins of sand and gravel. Shaped by the elements, flourishing tenaciously in the most minimalist of conditions, their lives are measured not in the millennia of more robust bristlecones, but in centuries...often mere decades.
'Duality', the cover photo for this album, is to me a matriarch of sorts and will remain unnumbered as a small token of a deeply intuitive and unapologetic respect that remains as transcendent and mysterious to me as it may seem odd to others. The essay that accompanies 'Duality' could, in many ways, apply as well to any other tree I may post in this series.
A perspective: Housed in the Tokyo Imperial Palace, the fifth oldest living cultivated bonsai in the world is something over 500 years old and is a designated National Treasure of Japan.
*in explore
Wild Bonsai 29*
Twenty-ninth in the series ‘Wild Bonsai’, this tree is thirty-eight inches (1.0m) in height and perhaps 300 years old.
'Wild Bonsai' is a numbered collection of photos of naturally occurring bristlecones (p. longaeva) generally less than five feet in height (1.5m) and - as nearly as I can estimate - between fifty and five-hundred years old - some much older. Most will have sprouted and survived in tiny cracks and crevices or miniature basins of sand and gravel. Shaped by the elements, flourishing tenaciously in the most minimalist of conditions, their lives are measured not in the millennia of more robust bristlecones, but in centuries...often mere decades.
'Duality', the cover photo for this album, is to me a matriarch of sorts and will remain unnumbered as a small token of a deeply intuitive and unapologetic respect that remains as transcendent and mysterious to me as it may seem odd to others. The essay that accompanies 'Duality' could, in many ways, apply as well to any other tree I may post in this series.
A perspective: Housed in the Tokyo Imperial Palace, the fifth oldest living cultivated bonsai in the world is something over 500 years old and is a designated National Treasure of Japan.
*in explore