This bonsai tree was planted in 1625 and survived the bombing of Hiroshima and is still growing today
Many people forget that trees are much older than human beings. In fact, there is even one Bonsai tree that has lived to be 396-years-old. It was first planted into the earth in 1625 and is now located at the United States National Arboretum in Washington D.C. A bonsai master from Japan named Masaru Yamaki gave the bonsai tree to the United States as a gift in 1976. At the time, the National Arboretum did not realize that the tree had survived the Hiroshima bombing in 1945. Yamaki and his family were just two miles away from the area where the American military dropped the B-29 atomic bomb, which wiped out 90% of the city and resulted in the death of 140,000 Japanese people.
But besides some minor glass related injuries Yamaki and his family did not get killed by the explosion. Furthermore, they kept the bonsai tree inside where it was safe with them.
In 2001, the truth about the tree was finally revealed after the grandsons of Yamaki visited the tree at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. The museum doesn’t typically advertise the history of the tree when you go there. However, you can now find its history of surviving Hiroshima on the museum’s website.
Through a Japanese translator, the grandsons told the story of their grandfather and the tree’s miraculous survival. Two years later, Takako Yamaki Tatsuzaki, Yamaki’s daughter also visited the museum hoping to see her father’s tree.
The museum and the Yamaki family maintain a friendly relationship and it is due to these visits that the curators know the precious value of the Yamaki Pine.
“After going through what the family had gone through, to even donate one was pretty special and to donate this one was even more special,” says Jack Sustic, curator of the Bonsai and Penjing museum. Yamaki’s donation of this tree, which had been in his family for at least six generations, is a symbol of the amicable relationship that emerged between the countries in the years following World War II. Dignitaries in attendance at the dedication ceremony for the trees included John D. Hodgson, ambassador to Japan, Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who said the gift from Japan represented the “care, thought, attention and long life we expect our two peoples to have.”
Today, more than 300 trees make their home at the museum, including bonsai grown in North America and penjing, the Chinese bonsai equivalent.
There are many misconceptions about bonsai, Sustic says. It’s not a type of tree because anything with a woody trunk can be bonsai. Rather, it’s an art form and for the bonsai master, “it’s a lifestyle,” he explains. Another common error is the proper pronunciation of bonsai; it’s BONE-sigh, not BAHN-sigh.
Bonsai trees can be cultivated from trees collected in the wild or in rare cases from seeds; for those whose thumbs are a little less green, they can be purchased at a nursery. They are planted in large containers and pruned frequently to maintain their silhouette. Sometimes, as in the case of the Yamaki Pine, multiple trees are grafted together to enhance the appearance of the tree. Though bonsai masters maintain a degree of artistic freedom they still look to nature for inspiration, recreating what they see in the natural world on a bonsai scale.
“It’s a marriage between horticulture and art,” but it’s unique because it’s always growing,” Sustic says while admiring the Yamaki Pine.
Because they are always growing, bonsai trees require daily attention. Sustic even likens caring for a bonsai tree to having a pet. But it’s due to this constant attention that bonsai like the Yamaki Pine live beyond the natural life expectancy of the trees from which they come.
The Yamaki Pine takes its familiar place near the entrance to the museum’s new Japanese Pavilion when it officially opened in 2016, and on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, the tree serves as a reminder of the continued peace between the United States and Japan.
“It’s a very special tree,” Sustic says.
Reference https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/390-year-old-tree-survived-bombing-hiroshima-180956157/
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