Bishan bonsai maker Guo Xiaobin is devoted to creating and passing on the traditional art

Guo Xiaobin pruning a bonsai, photo by correspondent Zhang Xiaohan

Hualong.com, May 11, 6:30 a.m. (correspondent Zhang Xiaohan). In a bonsai shop of only a few dozen sq m at the Yitianmen farmers' market, bonsais large and small are displayed in staggered arrangement on the tables and on the floor - Diospyros cathayensis, Buddhist pine (Podocarpus macrophyllus), boxwood, crabapple... dozens of varieties, each pot with its own bearing and ingenuity, dazzling the eye and truly lovely to look at. The person who created them is the shop's owner, Guo Xiaobin, who has been devoted to bonsai making for more than ten years.

Recently, when this writer came to the bonsai shop and met Guo Xiaobin, she was immersed in making a Diospyros cathayensis bonsai. Now she stared at the bonsai working out her idea, now she sketched on white paper, now she picked up her shears and pruned. She told this writer: "Making a bonsai is like creating a work of art. It looks like casual pruning, but in fact it is quite particular, and the most important thing is to master 'layering' and 'thought'."

Guo Xiaobin is 50 this year. Besides running the bonsai shop, she also has a nursery garden of more than ten mu in Hebian town, growing all kinds of flower seedlings as well as bonsai tree stumps. She told this writer that when she was a child, her parents took her into the city to see a bonsai exhibition once, and at the exhibition she was deeply attracted by those oddly shaped plants, and from then on there was no stopping it. After growing up, she even made tinkering with bonsai her career.

For more than ten years, Guo Xiaobin has devoted herself to making bonsai, and for this she often braves hardships and goes up the mountains to seek treasure. Every time she finds a satisfactory tree stump, she treasures it like a precious find and carefully "escorts" it home. "Bonsai is a plastic art, so the choice of stump material is very important. Only excellent stump material can produce an excellent work of art," Guo Xiaobin said. In making bonsai, the growing, pruning and shaping test the maker's focus and cultivation. From observing and conceiving, thinning and tending, bending branches into shape, and caring and fertilizing to staged shaping, completing these processes takes at least three to five years before the bonsai first shows its basic form.

After more than ten years of study and exploration, Guo Xiaobin has accumulated deep experience in bonsai cultivation, and she has also gradually grown from an initial outsider into a bonsai-making expert recognized by people in the circle, and has influenced a great many people to become bonsai enthusiasts. When the weather is fine, her bonsai shop welcomes batch after batch of enthusiasts who come to view the bonsai and learn the craft of making them. Guo Xiaobin always patiently explains the key points of care and leads everyone to observe pruning techniques. Because she holds nothing back, whenever beginners run into difficulties they think of asking her to step in, and some even bring their problematic bonsai straight to her to reshape.

"Making bonsai is hard. You have to endure hardship and toil, and even more you have to keep learning to improve your aesthetic sense for bonsai, but no matter how much time and physical effort it takes, I will keep doing it," Guo Xiaobin said. As a bonsai maker, she said, she has a duty to carry forward and pass on this traditional art.