Dory, Bryce and I took a little trip to Michigan for Yom Kippur this past weekend. Apart from the fact that I hate spending five hours on an airplane it was a quite enjoyable trip. I grew up in California, so I am accustomed to seeing golden brown hills all summer, but it was a refreshing reminder of my six years of living in upstate New York to go to a place where everything is green in the summer. The lawns were lush and trees were beginning to show fall foliage.

I picked up a book titled “Trees of Michigan” while I was in a bookstore and thumbed though it to find out what I was looking at as we drove around. Many of the species seen in and around the towns are cultivated, not native, but the native trees persist in good numbers as well. The state tree of Michigan is the Eastern White Pine, a five-needled pine, much like Japanses five-needle pine, with soft needles, showing a white stripe down the side. The trees look yellowy from a distance and whispy, but still have an upright pine habit. There are far more deciduous species than conifers in Michigan according to this book, and this was basically confirmed by looking around. Most of the conifers are pine or spruce, but in town areas there are many introduced species which muddle the overall picture.

The bonsai scene in Michigan is much smaller than in California because there is a problem: overwintering. I think that we are quite lucky here in the Bay Area to not really have to worry about protecting trees from the bitter cold of a real winter climate. With typical lows around 20 degrees, and lows for the winter sometimes as low as -15 degrees it is important to take trees off of benches and place them on the ground, covering the pot and soil surface with 3-6 inches of mulch…or to use a cold frame or garage for storage. Unfortunately, this type of chore is somewhat onerous, which perpetuates the mindset that bonsai is difficult. A visit to a local bonsai store showed that most people grow tropicals, which can be overwintered in a bright window of a house, and grown outside in the summer; a sad state of affairs in my opinion since the trees of Michigan have a beauty all their own. If bonsai is the appreciation of Nature through capturing a small piece of it, then growing tropicals in Michigan is not even bonsai.

When I returned to my own yard I looked around and counted myself lucky in some ways and unlucky in others. I have a collection largely made up of conifers, this is in part because they seem to grow better here, and in part because that is my preference. I only have one tree which has shown good fall color, it is a Norway Birch. We are cursed in a way, because of our warm winter weather, to not really get fall foliage. I look at my Japanese maples, of which I have a half dozen or so, and all I see is brown leaves, some covered in Powdery Mildew, some just burned by the salty air and dry sunny summer. I think I have made the decision that Japanese Maples are not the best trees to grow in San Francisco. Although I have a couple that I don’t think I can part with, I wont be getting any more and I’ll probably sell most of mine to make room for trees that are better suited to this coastal climate. Afterall, you can’t grow tropicals outside in a place like Michigan, so why should we fight nature so hard to grow a tree that likes cold long winters and humid summers in a place like San Francisco.

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