Bonsai!

While in the Pacific Northwest, I stopped by Weyerhaeuser's International headquarters in Federal Way, Wa. to view the Pacific Rim Bonsai collection. The collection includes bonsai from six different Pacific Rim nations.

Weyerhaeuser is also the home of the Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden that displays over 600 rhododendron species on 22 acres which in spring, when the rhodies are blooming, is the most amazing sight you will ever see! I highly recommend going to see it if you happen to be in the Seattle area in the Spring. When we were there this year, there wasn't much blooming, but they did have a couple nifty things I snapped photos of.

First is this climbing hydrangea:



I couldn't even get the whole thing in the photo. It had climbed well over a hundred feet up this tree!:



And in the giant greenhouse, where they have the tropical rhodies, they had this hanging pot of carnivorous pitcher plant (nepenthes truncata) which I thought was pretty keen:



OK, back on to the Bonsia. The bonsai ranged from a few years old to some several centuries old. Some of them were even grafted onto very old pine trees that were dug from the wild that were thousands and thousands of years old! All these grafted onto old wood bonsai were all older bonsai from pre-1960. You know, before that kind of thing was frowned upon.

There were single trunked bonsai, multiple trunked bonsai, bonsai trained to grow over rocks and even tropical bonsai that had to be kept in the greenhouse (most of the bonsai are outside). Every bonsai was unique and I got a little carried away (OK, *really* carried away) with the photos. But here goes:























































And there were so many more. These were only some of the Bonsai in the collection. My favorite ones were those that had been trained to grow in the down direction as they appeared as if they were overhanging a cliff.