BONSAI means, in Japanese, “tree in a pot.” It has become an art of miniaturizing trees and bushes, shaping them as they grow with wires, pruning them to make them look the way the bonsai enthusiasts want them to look. A properly cared for bonsai will always be a thing of living beauty.
For Joselito Alansalon, current president of the Cebu Bonsai Society, bonsai as a hobby came only after his retirement. Born in Santa Barbara, Pangasinan, Lito took up animal husbandry at the Araneta University and, after graduation, became a drug representative of Glaxo, Philippines.
After 29 years in the company, he retired in Cebu with his Cebuana wife, Elaine. It was at this time that Dr. Ado Macaraya, a bonsai enthusiast, invited him to the Department of Agriculture cooperative and introduced him to bonsai. Since then, Lito has been hooked on this hobby.
He says he gets his bonsai materials from seeds, from cuttings, and from old trees dying in the wilds which he digs up and revives. These, to quote him: “We grow and train according to our concept of how the bonsai is going to look…like a cascade, or windswept, or informal upright, or literati (in this, two-thirds of the plant is left bare and the leaves are made to grow only at the top). We try to emulate a big, old tree in miniature form.
We train the branches to make it look the way we want; prune the leaves and regularly also cut the roots. We have to repot every two years because all the nutrients in the pot will have been used up.”
Lito’s nursery of bonsai plants is in Valladolid, Carcar. In his home along Eucalyptus street, Lito keeps his bonsai garden. There are even bonsai plants by the roadside. The plants here are mature and looking exactly how he wants them to look, with just a bit of pruning here and there.
These trees, to quote, “are living works of art, binding together man and nature with the laws of evolution and growth. No two bonsai can be identical. Each is an individual piece of art designed to represent the most beautiful in nature, expanding its beauty as it ages.
Fine bonsai is never ‘finished’.” Thus, Lito is kept busy with his bonsai garden, cultivating it and nourishing it just as it nourishes his creativity and his sense of beauty.
