General
Norm Geisinger is 82 years old, and he owns an 85-year-old bonsai tree that’s less than two feet tall.
He’s owned the Lace-bark Chinese elm for 25 years. He’s the third owner.
Geisinger, a former financial director in New York, moved to Alabama in 2018 from Connecticut and soon after had open-heart surgery at Grandview Hospital.
He explains what he does with bonsai trees as similar to what surgeons did to his arteries.
“I had open-heart surgery; it’s sort of the same thing,” Geisinger said. “They went in and repaired my arteries so I could continue to live.”
The art of bonsai involves pruning branches and roots in a way that keeps the tree healthy, but in miniature.
“That’s how you get a tree to be 500 years old,” Geisinger said. “The oldest bonsai are about 500 years old.”
More than 1,000 people will visit his tree this weekend as part of the Alabama Bonsai Society tree show in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens auditorium, today till 5 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. About 70 bonsai trees are on display, all owned by more than 20 members of the Bonsai Society.
The bonsai exhibit is free to the public, and visitors are asked to vote for their favorite tree.
Bonsai is a Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese term penzai and has become an umbrella term in English for plants kept in shallow pots and pruned to stay dimunitive in size, artful replicas of full-grown trees.
At their largest, bonsai trees top out at no more than four feet, eight inches tall. Trees must be kept in pots, or in a nurse log container.
Bonsai trees look fully grown, despite being in miniature, disciplined to that shape by a caretaker.
There are bonsai clubs in Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville.
Bonsai is not a type of tree.
“It’s a process,” Geisinger said. “It’s an art form.”
The Aldridge Gardens Bonsai Society hosts workshops on the first Saturday every month, demonstrating the art of pruning and cutting a bonsai tree. The Alabama Bonsai Society meets monthly at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens.
Bonsai is a constant process of pruning and caring for a tree. “When you prune it, it causes new branches to grow,” Geisinger said. “Every couple of years, you take it out of the pot and remove one-third of the roots. You prune the roots back, which causes the tree to grow new roots. That way the tree gets its proper nutrients and moisture. If you don’t do that, the roots underground create a bark that the water can’t penetrate.”
It’s not an easy hobby. Plants can die from diseases or pine beetle attacks. “It can be frustrating,” Geisinger said. “A tree can die that you’ve had for 30 years.”
More than 50 years ago, Geisinger caught bonsai fever at the New York Botanical Garden.
“They had a full display of bonsai trees and a bonsai master they brought from Japan,” he said. “I just got intrigued.”
He bought two books and took up the art form. “It started out as ‘How do you do that?’”
Geisinger had 40 bonsai trees in Connecticut, then pruned his collection down to 17 after moving to Birmingham to be close to his daughter and granddaughter in Mountain Brook.
Now he keeps 12 bonsai trees.
“It makes you think,” Geisinger said. “You have to plan everything about the tree. It’s a living thing. You’re working with it to keep it alive, feed it, create direction.”
Japanese maples are a favorite for bonsai because the trees can be shrunk down and the leaves shrink with it. Sargent junipers, azaleas and Chinese privets are among the favored trees.
“A lot of these trees, if you put them out in the garden, would grow to 30 to 40 feet tall,” Geisinger said.
One of the trees, a Satsuki Azalea, was full of pink flowers.
Marge Wirth of Hoover, who has pruned it, moved it indoors and outdoors, into sun and into shade alternately in such a way that she got it to bloom right on cue for the show. She did the same for last year’s show. Next year, she’ll give the plant a rest, a break from the stress.
“It takes a lot of effort,” Wirth said.
UAB nurse Wayne Atkinson had been working four to five hours a week on his Shimpaku Juniper tree, which he planted in an old log known as a nurse log that serves as a pot. “It’s my meditation,” he said of the constant pruning.
Anika Paperd, show director, entered a Japanese maple that was damaged in her garage when a box fell on it several years ago. She nursed it back to health and adapted her pruning to the curvature of the damaged tree. “Over the past three months, it became the nicest tree in my collection,” Paperd said.
“That’s a reflection of nature,” she said. “Trees continue to grow, recover and change after they’ve been damaged.”
The sad little tree turned into something special and won a blue ribbon at the show. “It’s delicate and refined and it still looks like a real tree,” she said. “It feels very quiet, very peaceful. Those are the kind of trees that speak to me.”
The art of bonsai is the love of trees, and in a broader sense, a love of nature.
“It keeps you creative,” Geisinger said. “When you get my age, you need something to keep the brain working and thinking. It’s just fun.”
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