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Open Saturday 10am to 3pm
Closed Sunday and Monday
520-722-2000

MISSION STATMENT

For many years as we practiced and studied bonsai, we were constantly being confronted by the "tourist trees" and "pom-pom junipers" being sold at local street fairs, truck vendors at the roadside, and those holiday cutesy trees at the home improvement stores, grocery stores, mall carts, etc. Everybody bought them, and everybody killed them rather promptly. Why? Not because they had a "black thumb", but because most of those were junipers and should be kept OUTDOORS most of the time. The instructions, if any, somehow overlooked that simple basic fact, and the buyer put them indoors on the coffee table or TV set. In more recent years, we've seen the appearance (largely through Nurserymen's Exchange shipping nationwide) of rocks glued solid over the soil surface of these plants, making it impossible to tell if the soil is wet or dry. If you buy one of these wretched arrangements, immediately take a screwdriver and pry all those rocks off! Every wonder why there's no phone number to call, or a street address, for any of these so-called "bonsai vendors"? GET IT?? All they want is your money, and they could care less about the health of the plant.

We lose sales in our store, because we question the buyer about how much light he or she can provide the bonsai, frequent watering and regular fertilizing, etc. As a result, we talk ourselves out of a sale sometimes! We put a lot of work and daily care, often for a year or more, into each of our trees and we want to see the tree kept healthy after it leaves our store.

In our classes, and in meetings and workshops of the Tucson Bonsai Society, we emphasize the horticulture of each species of tree used to create a bonsai. The art of bonsai, such as design, styling, pruning, wiring, potting, etc., can be readily learned by putting in some study time and diligent observation. More important than these skills, however, is to know the nature of the plant species, such as a juniper (which cultivar?-- there are hundreds, and all slightly different) or a bougainvillea (totally different care for pruning, wiring, fertilizing, potting soil than the juniper, and at different times of the year). Our classes, and the programs of the Society, provide adaptation from the bonsai books to the Sonoran Desert environment -- a quantum leap!

Our indoor tropical bonsai are as easily cared for as a houseplant. The only difference between our Golden Gate ficus and the Benjamina ficus you get at K-Mart is that ours is a different genetic cultivar with small leaves, it has had bonsai shaping through pruning and wiring, and it won't drop leaves when you move it around.

As you can see from just a few of our photos, tropical bonsai such as ficus can not be made to look like what might be your concept of a "classical bonsai" such as a juniper or pine. Conifers have growth habits and textures that are quite different, and will produce different results from a bougainvillea, a ficus, or a desert tree. The "pine tree shape" has become a stereotype of bonsai; when in fact, each mature tree in Nature has a quite different shape uniquely it's own, such as an oak.

As our late sensei (teacher) John Naka has often reminded us, "Your bonsai should not look like a bonsai -- it should look like a tree."