What is Su-style bonsai? A guide to this traditional art

  Su-style bonsai is known for its antique elegance and rough simplicity. Gnarled old trunks and branches several decades or even a hundred years old are cultivated in small pots, yet can reach less than a chi in height. The second characteristic of Su-style bonsai is its fine, delicate and subtle craftsmanship, just like the silk-and-bamboo music of Jiangnan, giving people a feeling of elegance, splendor, brightness and smoothness. People praise bonsai as “three-dimensional paintings” and “silent poems”.

  Suzhou is located on the shore of Taihu Lake, with green mountains and clear waters, beautiful scenery, a humid climate and abundant rainfall. The plant varieties available here for making bonsai are extremely rich. Suzhou is also rich in various rocks suitable for landscape bonsai, such as the exquisitely porous Taihu stone, Kunshan white stone, Suzhou yellow stone and so on. This provides ample material conditions for making bonsai.

  Suzhou, a city established 2,500 years ago, is also a region with a gathering of talents and a flourishing culture in history, famous nationwide for poetry, calligraphy and painting. Wei Yingwu, Bai Juyi, Liu Yuxi and others of the Tang Dynasty all once served as governor of Suzhou. After the Song and Yuan dynasties, even more men of letters came from Suzhou or once lived in Suzhou, leaving behind many poems, essays and paintings for Suzhou. Since bonsai is an art form full of poetic and pictorial meaning, these poems, essays and paintings became the source of creative inspiration for bonsai artists.

  Those who had a relatively large influence on the style of Suzhou bonsai were the four great painters Shen Shitian, Wen Zhengming, Tang Bohu and Qiu Shizhou during the Chenghua and Hongzhi periods of the Ming Dynasty, later known as the “Wumen Painting School”. Among the literati of successive dynasties in Suzhou who made bonsai themselves, there were Fan Chengda in the Song Dynasty, Wen Zhenheng in the Ming Dynasty, Hu Huanzhang in the Qing Dynasty, and Zhou Shoujuan in modern times. Mr. Zhou once said: “My bonsai are, on the one hand, original creations of my own, and on the other hand, made by imitating famous paintings of the ancients.” He once made bonsai by imitating Tang Bohu's “Banana and Rock Picture” and Xia Zhongzhao's “Bamboo Charm Picture” and “Half-Window Clear Green Picture” of the Ming Dynasty, and Wang Yanke's “New Calamus and Longevity Rock Picture” of the Qing Dynasty.

  Su-style bonsai is mainly based on stump bonsai, and the materials used can be divided into two major categories: one is deciduous tree species, and the other is evergreen tree species. Among deciduous tree species, those mainly for flowers and fruit include winter jasmine, crabapple, pomegranate, plum blossom, wisteria and so on; those mainly for roots, branches and leaves include elm, trident maple, red maple, Japanese bush cherry, boxwood and so on. Among evergreen trees, those mainly for flowers and fruit include camellia, azalea, tiger thorn, gardenia, nandina, Chinese holly, osmanthus and so on, as well as those for roots, branches and leaves such as black pine, five-needle pine, Buddhist pine, ground juniper, true cypress; Chinese juniper, bamboo species, small-leaved holly and so on.

  Before the founding of New China, Suzhou bonsai making had many rigid rules. Each tree often had to be trained into ten pads in the pattern of “six platforms, three supports and one top” before it could be called a bonsai. This meant leaving three side branches on each of the left, right and back sides of the trunk, and when they slowly grew, training three pads on each of the left and right sides, namely the “six platforms”; then training three more pads at the back, namely the “three supports”; and finally training the top into one pad, namely the “one top”. These ten pads were all trained into round pad shapes with palm fiber, requiring more than ten years. It was not only labor-intensive and time-consuming, but also overly artificial and lacking in naturalness.

  In the late 1950s, Zhou Shoujuan and veteran craftsmen Zhu Zi'an, Zhang Shijin and others advocated that bonsai should be based mainly on natural beauty and opposed artificial affectation. Before the trees began to sprout in early spring, they collected old tree stumps from the mountain forests in the nearby suburbs, planted them in pots, placed them in sunny, wind-sheltered spots or greenhouses, maintained a certain humidity, and after they sprouted and formed branches, pruned and trained them as they went, so that they took shape by early autumn. This was the rapid cultivation method they created: dug up in the same year, cultivated in the same year, pruned and trained into shape in the same year, and enjoyed in the same year. Bonsai made by this cultivation method took various forms and were richer in natural beauty. At the same time, in technique they pioneered the precedent of giving priority to pruning with training as a supplement, changing the previous method of giving priority to training with pruning as a supplement. This relatively advanced method of rough training and fine pruning won the praise of experts across the country. At that time, horticultural workers from 22 large and medium-sized cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Jinan, Yantai, Qingdao, Lanzhou, Xi'an, Lintong, Wuhu, Hefei, Guilin and Jingdezhen gathered at the Suzhou Municipal Gardens Management Office to study the “rapid bonsai cultivation method”.