Bonsai Plants Quotes

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy. Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday.

Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When

Bonsai is a way of life, and the joy derived from it should always be for today, and for anyone at any age, whether already involved with it or whether considering the prospect. Planting the seed of a tree in a pot or contemplating the majesty of a mature Bonsai is immaterial; both evoke a sense of joy at any given moment in time. That moment, when it is experienced, will be in the present, and that is, today!

There is something in this Lametrie, a nice slip of our anthropocentrism. Why should Man be at the hub of all analogies? How would plants describe us, I wonder, what classification would they impose upon us? 'Described by a Plant' sounds like a good title to be used later. I feel we're being watched: by rubber plants, sparrow-grass, bonsai, small date palms, Chinese roses, geraniums and lemon trees. They keep an eye on us.

Tantalia' is the tale of a couple who decide to buy a little plant to keep as a symbol of the love that binds them. Too late, they realize that if the plant dies, the love that binds them will die too. And since the love that binds them is immense and they aren't willing to sacrifice it for anything, they decide to lose the plant amid a crowd of identical plants. Then comes the desolation, the tragedy of knowing that now they can never find it again.

Depression is a cruel bitch. She starts by planting little seeds all over your mind, knowing that life’s troubles will water it daily until it grows into a massive bonsai tree that crowds your thoughts and feelings, not leaving any room for leaves of hope to spur from it.

years, but so far that’s all it’s been—talk. “We could sell it,” Jade said. “Sell what?” Mom asked. “The Weirdland. I mean, if it’s not making enough money, what’s the point? It’s a stupid place to live, anyway. If we sell it, we can live somewhere normal,” Jade answered. “It’s not called the Weirdland,” I reminded her again. “I’ll call it whatever I want to call it!” Jade informed me in her snippy way. Mom spoke up. “We are not selling the Wonderland. It’s your daddy’s life.” Jade kept yapping, “I’m just saying . . .” Mom frowned. “Not another word, Miss.” Miss was code for “if you have good sense, you’ll shut up now.” And Jade did. When we got home, I found Daddy trimming his bonsai trees and plants. He was whistling a tune the way he sometimes does when he’s happily working. The sound of his whistling always makes me smile. Over and over, from the time I was little, I’d tried to learn how, putting my lips together and blowing. But no matter what, I’d only been able to produce the sound of plain old air, and after I’d failed for what felt like the hundredth time, I’d finally given up. “Howdeedoo, Zoe,” he said when he saw me. There were no customers around that I could see and I wondered if any had come in. “Any

In describing the causes of poverty, Muhammad Yunus has often compared a poor person to a bonsai tree. The seed of a bonsai has the potential to grow into a full-size tree, but, planted in a tiny pot, its growth is stunted. To Yunus, a person deprived of education or opportunity is like a bonsai. The constraint isn’t the seed, it’s the pot.

In this city of concave algae ponds, my mother begins to plant bonsais, nettle and leaf: silk against the skin.

A bonsai plant promotes ease and grace

I continue my search for the place of origin of the bonsaied white pine. The forest’s plants evoke in me a feeling that reality has slipped. All is familiar wind in Japanese oaks and maples sounds as it does in the Americas: coarse grained and deep voiced in oaks, sandy and light in the thin-leaved maples. Yet when I attend to a visual detail- the contour of a leaf, the runnels in bark, the hue of a fruit, I am unmoored by strangeness. My mind is foundering in the geographic manifestation of plant evolution’s deep history. The plants of east Asia, seemingly so far from eastern North America, are in fact close kin to the plants of the mountain slopes of Appalachia, closer kin by far than the plants of the northwestern US, or of Florida, or the arid lands of the Southwest. On Miyajima, I walk with sumac, maple, ash, juniper, fir, oak, persimmon, and rhododendron. A few Asian specialties spice this thoroughly Appalachian community, curiosities like Japanese cedar, snake vines, and umbrella pines. The cedars intermingle their soft, extended sighs with the more familiar sounds of oak and maple.