16980 Kercheval Pl • McCourt Building • Grosse Pointe, MI 48230 • 313.882.6900 • Office Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-5pm

16980 Kercheval Pl. • Grosse Pointe, Michigan 48230 • 313.882.6900 • Monday-Friday 9am-4pm

By Brad Lindberg | on July 27, 2022

Walking through the larch forest of Davisburg decades ago, Tom Trueman wished he could take it home. “I like larch because it’s a deciduous evergreen,” he said. Larch is the northern counterpart to the south’s bald cypress. Together they are among the few conifers to shed their needles during the barren time of year. “It goes into fall color, they turn gold and drop their needles for winter,” Trueman said. And soft needles they are, refuting the sharp, pointed tools for sewing, suturing or, by which pricked, torment. The larch tree’s feathery, one-inch needles are as Othello’s faithful Desdemona, “delicate with her needle … she will sing the savageness out of a bear.” “The needles are very soft,” Trueman said. “If you walk through a larch forest, it’s different than any other kind of forest because the ground is covered with old needles from previous years. It’s cushy and quiet. You can lie down in them and fall asleep.” Thereby an impasse. How to uproot and transport a forest of 60- to 100-foot-tall trees to the backyard of a 106-year-old house in Grosse Pointe Farms? Trueman, 66, from boyhood always good at overcoming mechanical challenges — he’s the type who can take things apart and put them back together — did an end run around nature. In the spirit of a landscape painter, Trueman created a living, photosynthetic representation of his favorite forest in miniature. He took up bonsai, the art of growing and pruning artificially dwarfed, potted plants into artistic, archetypal and stylized shapes. “I always wanted to recreate that forest,” said Trueman, standing among scores of scaled-down potted trees in his intimate and precisely maintained backyard. “People that are into bonsai always have single trees in a pot or a small stand, called a forest or landscape. I wanted to embellish on that and come up with something extreme.” He went banzai on bonsai, so to speak:

Photo by Brad Lindberg Bonsai hobbyist Tom Trueman prepares to fine-tune a flexible wire rod wrapped around a miniature tree branch. Wires guide the growth of branches to his liking. “You just keep making it into the picture you have in mind of what you want to represent,” he said.

“I took 15 or so (larch) and arranged them in a handmade pot to create a visual landscape. They are a nightmare to take care of because they grow so fast. I can’t keep up with pruning them.” “I hear clippers and I know where he is,” said Trueman’s wife of 40 years, Paula. “This is his happy place. He spends time out here and gets lost in it.” Bonsai is an ancient Chinese tradition continued by the Japanese. “Depending on a person’s culture or beliefs, bonsai trees are seen as symbols of harmony, balance, patience or even luck,” according to the article, “Behold the Bonsai,” at mymodernmet.com. “Many people simply use the potted trees as living ornaments for interior design, while others — Zen Buddhists for example — believe the bonsai is an object of meditation or contemplation.” Remaining exotic into the 20th century, bonsai had no entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, still a hallmark of Western world view. “Our military guys were exposed to it during the Second World War,” Trueman said. “Some were intrigued, brought it home and started tinkering with it. It sprung up from there. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of people into gardening are into this.” The mechanics of bonsai, pronounced with a long O, are pretty simple, at least for Trueman. He graduated from Denby High School, served a hitch in the Navy and held a mechanical operator’s license while self-employed in the heating and cooling business for 25 years prior to early retirement nearly 20 years ago. Bonsai centers on equilibrium. “The trunk of a tree only thickens to support the weight of itself,” Trueman said. “If you keep pruning a tree down all the time, the trunk isn’t really going to thicken. The roots of a tree are in balance with the top of a tree. The mass above ground is equal to the mass below ground.” Whether growing a tree in a pot from a seed or transplanting one from the ground, the principle is the same. “When you start training these, if you prune enough roots, you have to prune some off the top to maintain equality or the tree’s going to die,” Trueman said. “The first step in bonsai, if you’re going to take a tree growing in the ground, is to root prune it, top prune it, put it in a pot and start all over again.” Limbs are rigged with wire to train their direction of growth. “You just keep making it into the picture you have in mind of what you want to represent,” Trueman said. Some of his trees are bent at the hip to appear windswept. Others stand commandingly upright, all 2½ feet, with veritable chips on their shoulders. “Basically, I can have a lot of different things in a very small space that I could never put in the ground here and grow wild,” Trueman said. “I had more than 500 at one time. I didn’t have the time or space to take care of them. It was out of control.” In his collection are Hinoki cypress, Ezo spruce, round leaf beech, Japanese maple, Japanese white pine, American larch, Russian larch and, sentimentally, Zelkova carpinifolia, a member of the elm family. “I like it because it reminds me of the old American elms on my street where I grew up in Detroit,” Trueman said. “It was lined with elms until Dutch elm disease took them all away.” There are all kinds of reasons to like trees. For Trueman, trees span, and thereby link, human generations, becoming both touchstones to the past and gestures to the future. He foresees willing his favorite and oldest bonsai, a Schefflera resurrected in 1982 from his wife’s ailing houseplant, to their daughter, Lauren, a teacher in Romeo. “It was an ugly, five-foot plant with little growth on top because it was in a corner with potting soil rotting its roots,” Trueman said. “I chipped the trunk down into a small stump and let it regrow. I trained and clipped it as it grew. It’s something I can give to Lauren that will remind her of her mother and father.” All but about four members of his little forest live outside year-round. “I put them on the ground and bury them in snow until spring,” Trueman said. “If I brought them in the house, they’d be dead by spring. They have to get that hibernation cycle to rest and wait for the next season to start all over again.” Bonsai is an end unto itself. “Every year, the tree grows,” Trueman said. “I clip it, direct it. I tell it where it can grow, where it can’t grow by pruning it.” There’s always more to do. “One thing leads to another when you start learning about the taxonomy of trees and arboriculture,” Trueman said. “You have to start learning about pests and diseases. You learn about soil, what trees need. Some like it acidy. Some like it alkaline. That makes it interesting because there’s no end point. If I take any of these trees out of their pots and put them in the ground, they’re going to grow into a full-sized tree, 60 to 100 feet tall.”

Our Hometown DMCA Notices Newspaper web site content management software and services