The Toronto Bonsai Society Celebrates 60 Years Of Bonsai Education

The Toronto Bonsai Society is celebrating their 60th Anniversary Exhibition and Sale on October 11-13, 2024, at the Toronto Botanical Garden in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Achieving 60 years is a significant milestone that few other bonsai organizations have established a bonsai community yet.

The members and leadership of the Toronto Bonsai Society have successfully promoted bonsai for six decades, through exhibitions, displays, workshops, online zoom sessions, meetings, sponsoring international conventions and newsletters. 

The 60th Anniversary Celebration includes some of the premier, iconic and legacy developed and created bonsai in Ontario, Canada. 

The exhibition was well designed, it’s not their first show! All the containers were cleaned as well as the trees and appropriate display tables. You don’t see that at all exhibitions, but they have had practice for 60 years and know how to layout a show, welcome visitors, set up neat backgrounds, table coverings and skirting in a classy way. PLUS, they displayed some of the most beautiful bonsai created in all of Canada. The trees were well spaced out and had different size trees next to each other to provide visual interest.

The Toronto Bonsai Society is well known for their powerful old collected trees, mostly Eastern White Cedars and American Larch. There were many of them, but not overwhelming and on display for the three-day event. A great number of the displayed beautiful trees included those developed by members from common nursery grown trees as well as some grown from seed, cutting, division and air layers.

The true beauty of each bonsai was clearly shown, and a great number have been well trained with love for many decades. The Japanese bonsai community has a word often used to describe bonsai “mochigome” which means aged and grown in containers. Most of these trees had this feeling and was clearly seen with old flakey bark rounded crowns and especially the ground covering with several different species of moss and lichen. And, a great number of ground covers were not recently planted but carefully cultivated for years, some decades in containers. There are some things which cannot be instantly created and most of the trees demonstrated the love and devotion the Toronto Bonsai Society members have given to create, train and maintain their art and it is wonderful for them to share beauty to the public as well as seasoned bonsai growers.

Addition there was a suiseki display as well as stones used throughout the show which had over 112 individual trees. The Montreal Botanical Garden brought many of their old bonsai and Chinese pejingn to enhance the show and displayed mature, developed trees for inspiration.

I personally feel honored to be invited to teach, demonstrate and conduct a constructive  critique from my different point of view, so the members could see things which instantly caught my eye, but were not clearly noticed. This style of constructive critique can only be valuable with a skilled artist having decades of bonsai study. My heart full appreciation was overwhelming to me personally and I hope the Toronto Bonsai Society continues with their success in teaching and promoting the beauty of bonsai in Canada. Congratulations on your 60th Anniversary!

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