Rooted Reflections: The Bonsai Tree That I Failed to Grow

The Bonsai Tree that I Failed to Grow

Rooted Reflections: Life, Faith, and Lessons from the Garden by Urban Gardening Mom

Years ago I decided I was going to grow a bonsai.

It started, as most of my gardening ideas do, with a picture. A small tree in a shallow tray, trunk thick and weathered, branches arranged like a full-grown tree that had somehow been folded into something you could carry with two hands. I wanted that. I had a young citrus tree in a pot, one of our local ones, sturdy and stubborn, and I thought, this one. This is the one I will shape.

I read what I could. Bonsai is not a species, it is a practice, a way of growing. The Japanese refined it from an older Chinese art, and what struck me first was how much of it is about restraint. You prune the top so the tree spends its energy elsewhere. You wire a branch and bend it a few degrees, then wait months for it to hold that shape on its own. You lift the tree out of its pot, comb out the roots, cut some away, and set it back. You do this again and again for years, sometimes for a lifetime, and the tree is still not finished when you hand it to someone else.

The part I did not understand at the time is that the bonsai grower is not fighting the tree. They are working with what the tree already wants to do. Every cut is a conversation. Cut here and the plant answers by pushing growth there. An experienced bonsai grower understands those answers.

But me - I was not having a conversation. I was simply giving instructions.

I cut a stem because the picture said the tree should be short. I snipped every side shoot that grew in a direction I had not planned. When new growth came up from the base, I took it off, because it was not part of the design. I was watering, feeding, and pruning almost weekly, and I remember feeling productive. Look how attentive I am. Look how much I am doing for this tree.

In due time, the poor little citrus had gone pale and thin. It started losing most of its leaves.  It kept sending out new shoots and I kept removing them, and it kept trying, which I now think was the saddest part. In our climate, a citrus tree in a pot on a Manila balcony is already working hard enough. And I had taken away whatever little strength it had left. 

Meanwhile, in my own family,  I was doing the same thing, and I did not see it then either.

When my daughter (an only child) was in her early teens, I had a version of her in my head - the same way I had a picture of that bonsai tree. The course she would take. The friends who would be good for her. How she would excel in school and sports, behave and speak to relatives, how she would spend a Sunday, what she should wear and so on. When she grew in a direction I had not planned, I pruned. Not with scissors, with questions that were really corrections, and a vocal tone that made my opinion obvious before I even finished what I was trying to say. I had convinced myself that it was proper guidance. 

Filipino families are good at closeness. We are less practiced at distance. We are taught that a good parent is an involved parent, that concern is proof of love, and so it takes a long time to notice when concern has quietly become control. Nobody in our household would have called it that. It looked like caring. It felt like caring. And deep inside, my daughter was growing pale and thin too, in her own way, and I was too busy being her mom to catch the early signs.

I do not remember one dramatic moment when it changed. I remember a smaller thing. She made a decision I disagreed with, and I said nothing, and it turned out fine. Then it happened again. Somewhere in there I understood that the thing I was afraid of, her becoming someone other than the person I had imagined, was not a failure. It was the whole point. She was never going to be my design. She was going to be herself, and the only real question was whether I would be someone she could come back and talk to afterward.

I have prayed about a lot of things I could not fix. This one I mostly prayed about after the fact, asking to be shown what I had already broken and whether there was still time. I do not think I have this settled. I still catch the old reflex, the urge to reach for the shears. But I have come to believe that God gave her to me to raise, not to author, and that there is a kind of trust that only shows up when you finally stop holding on so tightly.

I stopped pruning that citrus. Not out of wisdom. I simply gave up. I moved it into a bigger pot with good potting mix, set it in a corner where it got real sun, and after that I only fed it occasionally, and watered it. Most of the time, I stayed out of its way.

It grew. Crooked, thorny, taller than I ever wanted it to be, with branches that go wherever they please and no shape a bonsai judge would forgive. It also turned out to be the most generous thing in my garden. A calamansi tree, when given the right environment, will fruit and fruit. I pick more than our kitchen can use and send the rest home with the neighbors. Every few months I'd cut something back, but only what is dead or in the way.

My daughter, who is now twenty-one, is about to finish college this school year. She is not the person I sketched out when she was thirteen. She is actually better- a very smart, beautiful and strong-willed young lady- and she is hers. 

I am not sorry I failed at bonsai. It is a beautiful art, and I have real respect for the people who practice it, the ones who can wait fifteen years for a branch to say 'yes'. I was never patient enough.  I never learned how to listen to what that tree was telling me. But this fully grown calamansi tree in the corner of my garden is still one of the things I am proudest of in all my years of gardening, and it is the one I did the least to. I gave it space, watered it once a week, and provided it with all-natural nutrients it actually needed. It already knew what to do with all of it.

Was there something in your garden, or in your family, that turned out better than the plan you had for it?

-UGM-