2 months ago
10
FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) - Volunteers astatine the Clark Bonsai Museum person been preserving trees successful Fresno for 10 years, but volunteers accidental the trees themselves person a deeper past than astir visitors adjacent cognize about.
Managing Curator Bob Hilvers says helium has been doing bonsai for the past 40 years - and helium inactive has to explicate to visitors that bonsai is not a benignant of tree.
"It's a communal misnomer connected folks' portion that bonsai is simply a taxon of plant, Hilvers said. "It's really an creation signifier that uses plants arsenic the medium."
Hilvers says the Clark Museum's extremity is to showcase immoderate of the unthinkable trees that the radical of Fresno whitethorn not adjacent cognize about.
The trees successful the museum's postulation include:
- a histrion whose effect came from a histrion that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima successful 1945
- a histrion implicit 1,000 years old
- a histrion that was preserved by the neighbors of a household taken distant during the Japanese internment that started successful 1942.
Volunteer Jey Xander adjacent says the trees successful the depository are sentient, adding that if visitors could perceive the stories of the Hiroshima Peace Tree, they'd beryllium amazed and inspired.
"I consciousness that this histrion is precise happy," Xander said. "It's survived a lot. Its genitor histrion survived a batch - that quality to flooded adversity, that's beautiful."
Xander says that successful their clip caring for the trees, they've been capable to thatch others bonsai astatine the Clark Museum's bonsai-making classes. They accidental it brings them backmost to their clip arsenic an English teacher.
"I miss teaching very, precise much," Xander said. "In immoderate mode that I tin benignant of clasp that again. I emotion it."
The depository is presently preparing for its World Bonsai Day event - and the museum's newest exhibition.
"We've got a batch of organized chaos going connected close now. We're switching retired the exhibition. We bash a caller accumulation astir each 90 days," Hilvers said. "I deliberation that if [anyone] takes the clip and comes to spot us, they volition beryllium suitably impressed."
The Clark Museum is unfastened from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. connected Tuesdays done Sundays, wrong the Shinzen Friendship Garden astatine Woodward Park successful Fresno.
