When Harald Lehner was given his first bonsai, it died. The 61-year-old is now an internationally renowned expert on the plants. What does it take to be successful with the trees? Among other things: “A lot of feeling”. A visit to the garden.
You look for a little tree in nature, dig it up, trim the roots, put it in a bowl, embed it, then trim the branches, shape the branches with wire and the bonsai is done. “Roughly that’s true, but it’s not that easy to conjure up a ‘tree in a pot’, as bonsai is called in Japanese,” says Harald Lehner, who is now one of the internationally sought-after bonsai specialists. When the 61-year-old was given a bonsai forest about 40 years ago, things went wrong at first, because all the trees died. “Obviously because of improper treatment,” as Lehner notes in retrospect. This failure at the time was a kind of “key experience” for him, which led him to take a closer look at bonsai plants. “I bought a book, quickly understood what I had done wrong and then started again.”