Bonsai trees combine art, nature, family for Long Islanders

While some people are content to mind their garden, Joe Lesnick of Hauppauge tends to his forests. He presides over five, but rather than sprawling land stretching for acres, these are bonsai forests in trays a few feet long.

Lesnick, 66, a transportation administrator for Eastern Suffolk BOCES, owns and maintains two Japanese maple forests, two trident maple forests and one larch forest.

The trees stand 18 inches to 40 inches tall in pots or trays 2.5 feet deep and 2 to 3 feet wide.

“Once a week, I fertilize them and change the orientation, so they get sunlight from the opposite side,” Lesnick said. “I water them daily in the heat of July and in August twice or three times a day.”

While gardening may have grown as a hobby during the homebound pandemic, bonsai has been attracting those with a passion for art and plants.

The Long Island Bonsai Society has grown from under 40 members in 2014 to nearly 60 in 2023, according to Hal Johnson, who has led the group since 2018.

“There are many styles of bonsai, formal upright, slant or windswept bonsai, cascade bonsai that comes out of the pot,” said Johnson, a 66-year-old Mill Neck resident. “Each person designs their own.”

Bonsai basics

Bonsai are miniature trees or the craft of creating “living sculpture in miniature,” as Johnson puts it, trained by wires to a desired shape in a pot or tray.

“It’s a little bit of science and a little bit of art. You prune it to what you think it should look like,” Johnson said. “The art is in making a bonsai look older than its actual age.”

Half-gardener and half-sculptor, bonsai owners typically use special soil mixes for better drainage with pumice, lava and Akadama clay, from Japan. The blend is frequently adjusted to the type of tree.

“Bonsai don’t live in regular garden soil,” said Roxanne Berlin, 64, of Huntington Village, an interior designer. “They need a lot of drainage and aeration.”

Bonsai collectors often buy plants from nurseries or garden stores, using special soil in pots and wires to sculpt trees.

Costs vary from as little as $25 to thousands of dollars, plus supplies, said Robert Walzer, of Port Washington, who spends $25 to $100 per tree, a one-time cost for the tree's lifespan, though one can spend more.

“I inherited most of my tools and my bonsai pots from my dad, so that didn't cost me anything,” said Walzer who recently bought a bag of pumice and a bag of lava for $28 each from the society.

Indoor scenery

Lydia Wen, 50, a librarian from Glen Cove, is a newcomer to bonsai who began practicing this mix of art and horticulture after COVID-19 struck.

“I’d been admiring bonsai from afar for a long time,” Wen said. “This, to me, was another step to bringing a landscape into a more private setting.”

She was born in China, came to the United States at age 8 and has lived in Glen Cove for nearly 22 years. Wen bridged the gap from interest to practice by attending Long Island Bonsai Society meetings at Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay.

"I always considered it a sort of cultivation and meditation,” she said of the spiritual side of bonsai. “It’s a way to harness your world, but it’s very personal.”

She has two bonsai trees about 7 inches tall and talks of arranging sand and a sort of small shoreline, creating a scaled-down scene.

“Imagine thousands of years of water hitting the rocks,” she said of the design. “You have to imagine all of this.”

She keeps her trees inside on a shelf near photographs and paintings that provide a setting for these miniature marvels.

“I have a lot of landscape paintings that look like places where a windswept bonsai would reside,” she said. “I have a lot of Chinese paintings, because I have a great-uncle who is a painter. I grew up looking at these crags and seeing little pines growing through the crags. I’m trying to recreate that.”

Family roots

Robert Walzer’s love of bonsai grew out of the family tree: His father, Seymour Walzer, who died in 2011, helped establish the Long Island Bonsai Society in the 1980s, serving as president in the 1990s.

“I learned [bonsai] as a child,” said Walzer, 60, of Port Washington, an editor at the Wall Street Journal. “I got the basics, how you work on bonsai, cutting roots and branches, wiring branches, what kind of soil to put in there.”

Walzer has about a dozen bonsai, mostly 1- to 2-feet high, including four from his father. “You want the height short, but you want the trunk to thicken,” he said. “That’s the sign of an old bonsai, a thick trunk.”

He keeps his bonsai on his backyard deck and owns a bonsai bench that belonged to his father. Walzer fertilizes them and walks into the woods to find moss to “lay down on the surface.”

While the visible is beautiful, the invisible beauty of bonsai is his father’s memory.

“I have memories of him since I was a kid working outside every summer. He’d take out the bonsai, put them on his bonsai bench, which I inherited,” Walzer said. “It’s a bit like having a baby. It requires a lot of nurturing and work.”

To be bonsai or not to be?

That’s the question. Or rather it’s whether it is “bonsai” or pre-bonsai. Berlin sees bonsai, or pre-bonsai for now, as more than her passion.

“It has now become my addiction,” she said. “I have a patio full of pre-bonsai material and a Japanese garden that I’ve been developing for two years.”

Pre-bonsai, she said, is bonsai still being worked on, with wires still shaping the tree rather than a final form. “I guess you can say a bonsai is never finished,” she said. “It’s always evolving and changing.” She discovered bonsai through the Long Island Bonsai Society online four years ago.

“That got my passion fueled,” Berlin added. “I love anything to do with plants. Bonsai is art, horticulture and design.”

She keeps her more than 50 pre-bonsai or developing bonsai in pots on her patio, sometimes positioning them on stumps in her Japanese garden. She brings them into a barn during winter, protecting them from more than the cold.

“The wind is the most harmful to any tree in the winter, but particularly a bonsai,” she said. “You really need to protect the roots from freezing.”

Home-grown

Lesnick has been practicing bonsai for a decade, but trees in his collection are older. They started as ordinary plants, before he worked on them with wires, transforming them into bonsai.

“I have trees started from seedlings to trees started from seeds as houseplants 35 years ago,” he said. “By learning the art of bonsai, I was able to convert a house plant into a bonsai.”

Lesnick has about 25 bonsai and 100 pre-bonsai from 4 to 40 inches tall, including maples (deciduous trees) and several pines (conifers) outdoors, as well as tropical trees.

“I have a room in the basement with fluorescent lights and humidifier to keep the lights bright for plants,” Lesnick said of colder months. “I like to hang out there.”

He grew up on an upstate New York dairy farm. “I was always involved in horticulture,” he said. “We raised plants and flowers for decorations.”

Lesnick’s plants spawn others through cuttings, including a Schefflera or umbrella tree. “I’ve had so many cuttings,” he said. “I have six bonsai from it.”

He trims roots assiduously. “If there are too many roots, they can’t absorb water,” he said. “A maple has to be root pruned once a year. A pine can be pruned once every two or three years.”

Join the club

Hal Johnson became interested in bonsai in his 40s, but when he retired in 2017 from quality control for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and dietary supplements, he pursued the passion.

“When I was doing microbiology for Del labs, I had a heavy international travel schedule, which didn’t do too well for my trees at home,” he said of gardening.

Johnson joined the Long Island Bonsai Society 20 years ago, became president in 2018 and has 13 bonsai at home.

“The tree is a representation of a much-larger tree,” he said. “The art of bonsai is shifting the scale to miniature.”

Johnson said bonsai are typically green, but colors can change with blossoms like Azalea with yellow, pink, orange, red or white flowers. Foliage for Ginko or Larch can turn golden yellow. “American and Japanese larches have beautiful fall colors,” he said.

Johnson said the most common mistake bonsai neophytes make is overwatering and under-watering.

People can win bonsai from auctions at the club, but he said the big challenge is growing them. “The real art is creating and maintaining them,” Johnson said. “You have to prune the foliage and the leaves.”

He keeps his bonsai outdoors or in an unheated garage, but said bonsai can become the center of soothing indoor spaces before returning outdoors.

“In Japan, they’ll set up a corner of the house, an alcove,” Johnson added. “That’s called a Tokanoma. It may include a scroll, rock or other artwork. It usually has a theme, for example season or energy.”

He said the society holds monthly events where experts discuss aspects of bonsai. Many collectors enjoy the community around, as well as beauty of, the plants.

“Get educated first, see what you like,” Johnson said. “Going to the club and exhibitions is one way of discovering that.”