Bonsai trees a true artform

LONG before bonsai trees were trendy, they were simply “big plants in small pots”.
That is where the fascination began for Stephen and Dianne Rawkins, the owners of the Australian Bonsai Grower at Hubner Park.
“I came here, met my wife and her father did bonsai – he did it after the occupation of Japan,” Mr Rawkins said.
“Back in those days, if you went and told your mate down the pub you were doing bonsai, they would take you out the back and give you a flogging, so he used to tell everyone he did big trees in small pots.”
The Rawkins were gifted their first bonsai plants from Dianne’s father’s collection on their wedding day.
Thirty-odd years later, they are one of the few local hobby bonsai specialists around, Mrs Rawkins said.
“We started it as a hobby, but we couldn’t get good stock to work on, so we started growing our own stock and it went from there,” she said.
Bonsai is the art of growing ornamental varieties of trees and shrubs in pots.
“Sometimes you can get a tree that’s only 12 months old and style it into a bonsai, or you could have a 25-year-old clipping that you could re-work and bring it back into shape again,” Mr Rawkins said.
Mr Rawkins manages the stock and gets the plants ready for styling, while Mrs Rawkins turns them into art.
“Dianne does the other side which is all the bonsai,” he said. “I haven’t got the patience to do it.”
Like all art, they have a price point to match, reflecting the years it takes to get a plant ready for retail, and many more after that to make it look stunning.
They cost anywhere from $30 for the average un-fashioned plant, with little work done to it, to thousands for the bespoke pieces.
Mr Rawkins said there is no worse feeling than having someone undervalue that time and effort by trying to barter the price down.
Bonsai is never complete. It is a constant work of art that is maintained over centuries, with some conifer varieties handed down to many generations.
Mr Rawkins said they can last much longer.
“Some of them will grow to a thousand years plus,” he said. “You know that because the Japanese have an auction system, and when you sell a plant there, it’s got the paperwork with it – who owned it before, what was the date they bought it, if someone did some work to it – it just goes on and on and on.”