Sports and leisure

The Slowest Hobby

To a visitor at a show, a bonsai tree may seem little more than a charming ornament: a pine or a maple no taller than a teapot. To the grower it is the visible record of decades of decisions. Most such trees belong to perfectly ordinary species and are kept small by careful pruning of their roots and branches, while copper wire, wound round a limb and removed a season or two later, persuades it into a new line. A careless cut made in a single afternoon may take ten years to grow out, and many of the most admired specimens have passed through the hands of three or four owners, none of whom expected to see the tree finished. What growers value is less the result than the [1] (PERSEVERE) the work demands of anyone prepared to tend something that will very probably outlive them.