Pacific Bonsai Museum

When we arrived at the Rhododendron Species Foundation & Botanical Garden in Federal Way I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Pacific Bonsai Museum was open since it had closed in March of 2009 due to Weyerhaeuser’s financial problem, and I didn’t realize it had reopened under a different name.  

Several of the bonsai on exhibit looked familiar, particularly this one with its striking container.

It’s hard not to like every bonsai in the collection since as they note on their web site it “… maintains a collection of 150 bonsai that are among the finest examples of bonsai anywhere in the world.”  

On this visit I seemed to focus on bonsai that reached out in a single direction, like this one that seems to be hanging over a cliff.

This one

 reminds me of the wind-swept trees that line the cliffs of the Pacific Ocean.

A fellow visitor asked me what I looked for in a bonsai, and I replied that I had a strong attraction to bonsai where new growth seemed to spring from dead wood.

I turns out that there are prescribed “Deadwood bonsai techniques” and distinctive styles that I had somehow inferred from observing bonsai over time.