INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Jim Smith was in a hurry to get to work when the phone rang. The call was from South America, and a woman’s familiar voice asked the tiresome question one more time: Would he be willing to sell a prized tropical bonsai, his world renowned specialty, a specimen created by him and tended to weekly for more than a quarter century.
Smith, whose bonsai were in the National Arboretum in Washington, had turned her down before.
“Make me an offer,” Smith said, exasperated. The number that came back was enough to make him say yes: $25,000. In Japan, that would have been nothing, he says, but in the U.S.? Unheard of.
“I didn’t want to sell it. I had it way overpriced,” grouses Smith through his grin. “I guess she caught me at the right time.”
At 87, Smith, the premier bonsai master in Florida and a world expert on tropical and sub-tropical bonsai, is clearing out his stock, his sight failing and having lost his son and heir to the business three years ago.
Smith has donated 100 of his best specimens to Heathcote Botanical Gardens in Fort Pierce, on display in a space designed by Vero architect Peter Moor. It is the largest collection of tropical bonsai by a single master in the United States.
“We get rave reviews,” says Cynthia Warren, the garden’s executive director. “We’ve had several international bonsai masters from Japan and California come through. It’s definitely increased the traffic to Heathcote. People are just amazed at the collection.” The rest of his life’s work is for sale at his Vero Beach nursery and on his website.
Like a great master, Smith still shares his knowledge at free workshops every fourth Sunday of the month at the nursery on Old Dixie HIghway. People from Miami to Jacksonville bring their bonsai and solicit his advice. Since moving to Vero in 1956, Smith pioneered the use of tropical specimens like the dwarf jade and the willow leaf ficus in a tradition dominated by cold-climate trees like cedars and maples. He is largely credited with popularizing the banyan style of bonsai, now used throughout the world.
Growing up in Indiana, a decorative plasterer by trade, Smith has always loved miniatures.
From scale models of planes and trains in childhood, he turned to plants after seeing an ad for a miniature Ming tree kit. Though the seeds never grew, the kit spawned a fascination for the art of bonsai.
In 1975, he went to the first International Bonsai Convention in Miami’s Fontainebleau hotel. “It blew my mind,” he says.
The specimen he entered ended up on the cover of Bonsai magazine, and the annual Bonsai calendar.
“I was on cloud nine.”
Next year, Heathcote will hold the first annual James J. Smith Juried Bonsai Competition with a $1500 first prize, says Patrick Giacobbe, curator of Smith’s collection at Heathcote. He says an international bonsai association has asked to display trees from Heathcote’s collection at its upcoming convention in Orlando.
Giacobbe, 70, himself a respected master with 50 years’ experience, has to prune the growing, changing bonsai not in his own style but in Smith’s, exchanging photographs and instructions with Smith via e-mail.
“No one knows Jim Smith until they know his trees,” he says. Smith’s designs are based in part on a sense of gender: angular trees are masculine, curving trees are feminine. He chooses the pots accordingly: rectangular for the masculine trees, oval for the feminine. Of varying depths, pots are essential to the finished product. For years, he kept a kiln at his nursery and made his own.
That all went away with a hurricane. The nursery got through the hurricanes of 2004. Then in 2005, the blustery Wilma came through on the birthday of Smith’s wife – also named Wilma. While most of Wilma’s wind damage stayed well south of Vero, something awful happened on Old Dixie that day. Gusts ripped the shade cloth off his greenhouses and wrapped them around the bonsai like tentacles, whipsawing precious specimens against each other and smashing their containers.
The business never recovered, he says.
Today, the only place to really see Smith’s genius is at Heathcote. There, according to Giacobbe, the almost spiritual beauty and balance of his trees stop guests in their tracks at the first tree they see, a 4-foot specimen the garden uses as its logo.
“They’re just frozen. They’re stuck. I have to bring them back into reality. ‘Hey, wake up, there’s other trees to look it.’ “
For Giacobbe, who was handpicked by Smith, the trees are Smith’s legacy. One false move can imperil Smith’s design, one dead branch can destroy its balance, and a poorly timed root trim can doom the tree. Water, light, temperature and fertilizer are all crucial variables.
After Smith was invited to donate two beloved specimens to the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., both died in the arboretum’s care when they were stored in a temporary greenhouse under questionable conditions. Smith’s bonsai (pronounced “bonesigh”) require species-by-species familiarity. The slash of a chain saw, the strictures of wire, the snap of a twig are his raps on the knuckles, training the trees to angle just so.
Sometimes, a wild shoot is left to grow like a gawky adolescent two feet beyond the tidy crown of foliage. Smith smiles with anticipation.
“I’m letting it get thicker,” he says. “Then I’ll break it right here” – he pinches a point not far from the trunk – “and that’ll make it branch off again.” “Most people see a plant and never think, ‘Why do they grow that way?’ “ says Smith, his voice rising with incredulity that his own wonderment might elude others altogether.
Essential to the art of bonsai is time, and Smith fears that for him, it is in short supply.
Though his doctor tells him he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, his vision is another matter. Glaucoma and macular degeneration have taken away his sight in one eye, and the other is dimming.
With his wife Wilma in a nursing home now, another son, Greg, has moved down from north Florida to live with him. But he has no interest in bonsai.
Smith understands; training tiny trees is a peculiar fascination. There is no real marketing of bonsai, though a few landscape designers use them for Japanese gardens or for their pool terraces. Mainly though it is simply a passion, further by fellow collectors and nursery owners.
Smith came to tropical bonsai – and to Vero – by chance. The dust from his work and the cold Indiana winters were ruining his health, he says. He and his wife had taken a vacation in Florida and “just loved it.” They started looking for a town with a Catholic school for their boys, and found St. Helen’s in Vero.
“I don’t know what we were thinking. It was scary. We had small kids and I knew absolutely no one.” He went to work for General Development Corporation, the company that developed Port St. Lucie. Then in the 1978, he sold a coin collection and bought eight acres on Old Dixie to open a nursery.
At first, he grew cactuses, sprouting them in flats in his sons’ bedroom. Bonsai then began to consume him. Among the first trees he created was the one that sold recently for $25,000.
“It’s not that we still have him. It’s that we had him at all,” says Giacobbe. “If it wasn’t for Jim Smith, there would have been a big void in tropical bonsai.”
