Caring for over 600 bonsai at his own home, Miguel Hernandez is also the resident artist at his late teacher's nursery in California.
Oaxacon-born Hernandez standing next to a ficus tree that he turned into a bonsai tree. Photo: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/TNS
Ever since founder George Yamaguchi died in 2005, Hernandez has cared for Yamaguchi's creations as the nursery's resident bonsai artist. Although he refuses the term master and is reluctant to call himself an expert, Hernandez is the type of bonsai artist that only a place such as Los Angeles could produce.
Hernandez, 58, grew up helping his father grow corn, onions and tomatoes on their family farm in a small village in Oaxaca. Pleasure wasn't part of what he learned. As a boy, he remembers his parents scolding him for planting a papaya tree in a pot because it would never bear fruit.In 1980, he came to the States to find work and landed at Junior's Delicatessen in Westwood. He used to walk by the nursery on his way home from work.
His most famous tree, collected in the National Bonsai Museum in DC, is called Shinsei, meaning"voice of the gods". The tree is a powerfully built, asymmetrical black pine whose branches flare boldly at the bottom, recalling how a tree might look if it stood alone in a meadow without competing with other trees for sunlight.
Yamaguchi never named or trained a successor, Marianne said. But after Hernandez spent a few months of silent observation at a distance, Yamaguchi told the younger man to come to the nursery and start taking classes.Hernandez learned mostly by watching Yamaguchi and paying attention to how the bonsai artist would correct his trees. Hernandez's first tree, purchased at a sale, was a juniper tree that died after a few months because he kept it indoors instead of outside where it belonged.
His favourite kinds of trees have quirky, improvisational shapes and forms, like a ficus tree, severed at the trunk and supported by the exposed roots, like an octopus standing up on its tentacles. The neighbourhood, which is the western-most Asian enclave in Los Angeles, was exempted from redlining in part because Westside homeowners treasured Japanese landscaping and wanted their gardeners to live nearby, according to the book. A large, endemic population of homeless veterans also made the land less desirable to white homeowners.
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