23.02.12

Even though trees easily can be defined as natural works of art, mankind historically has enjoyed tinkering with nature’s originals to shape and manipulate them into living sculptures.

Bonsai is the art of dwarfing trees, whereby every branch and twig of a single potted tree is bent, wired or snipped to produce a work of aesthetically appealing shape and texture. These miniature landscapes originated in ancient China and were spread eastward to Japan by Buddhist monks. The Japanese refined the art form, in which the container plays an equal role in the overall artistic impression of the piece. Bonsai literally means “tray planting.”

As an art form in which trees and shrubs are pruned into geometrical and whimsical shapes, topiary is more about foliage than trunks and branches. Although it is suspected to have originated in earlier cultures, it is first introduced into written record in ancient Rome, somewhere between 38 B.C. and 14 A.D. Foliage-sculpting fell out of practice during the Dark Ages and reappeared in the mid-15th century in Italy. It experienced its “Golden Age” in England during the reign of William the Orange and has regularly fallen in and out of garden landscape vogue ever since.

Source: Columbia Daily Tribune