Buteo Bonsai, Durango Colorado

I come from a family of tree people, woodworkers, furniture makers, arborists, sculptors of wood, all. My appreciation of trees must have begun with the first inhalations of wood dust in my dad’s workshop as I toddled under his feet or babbled from the crook of his arm while he sanded stock for a piece of furniture. My first attempt at tree cultivation (I hesitate to call it Bonsai) took place on a window sill in our home in Helena Montana as a high school kid but I think the seed may have been planted much earlier, when I attended a predominantly Japanese grade school for a year in California. As best as I can tell, it was being surrounded by Japanese language, food, and culture that may have started me down the path towards a solid obsession with Bonsai. 

I have attempted to find nursery material, cultivate trees, collect trees, and study the practice of Bonsai in areas as ecologically divergent as Albuquerque, New Mexico and Orange County, California. The collection I have now has been developed entirely at home, in our yard in Durango Colorado. I have begun to study occasionally at First Branch Bonsai, with Todd, and was an early devotee of Mirai Live.

My hope for this site is to share stories from the interconnected roots of tree collecting, development, maintenance, and refinement. We do not have a local club or even a loose affiliation of Bonsai practitioners. I feel quite lucky to have found a couple of local enthusiasts, patient enough to swing by the garden and talk trees for hours on end.  I’ll keep adding to this site as a way to document the journey of living with and caring for trees. 

Enjoy, 

Andy