The Larz Anderson Collection of Japanese Dwarfed Trees at the Arnold Arboretum was originally imported into the United States by the Honorable Larz Anderson in 1913, upon his return from serving as ambassador to Japan. The core of the collection consists of seven large specimens of compact hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Chabo-hiba’)—between 270 and 145 years old—that Anderson had purchased from the Yokohama Nursery Company (Figure 1). While these are certainly not the oldest Japanese dwarfed trees in the United States, they have been under cultivation longer than any other plants currently growing From Temple to TerraceThe Remarkable Journey of the Oldest Bonsai in AmericaPeter Del TrediciFigure 1. Portrait of ‘Chabo-hiba’ #881-37 started in 1862. It stands 110 centimeters tall by 140 centimeters wide. Photographed in 2002 by Colin Lewis.in North America. To be sure, dwarfed trees had been imported into the United States from Japan prior to 1913, but none of these plants are alive as far as I have been able to determine.The fact that the Larz Anderson Collec-tion has survived the ravages of both time and occasional neglect for the past ninety plus years is not only a testament to the care it has received, but also to the incredible durability of the plants themselves. In a very real sense, the ‘Chabo-hiba’ hinoki cypresses in the Larz Anderson Collection provide a direct link to the early 1900s, when the wealthy Americans and Europeans, infatuated with all things oriental, were passionately collecting cultural artifacts from Japan, and the Japanese, in their headlong rush to modernize, were only too willing to oblige this passion. The purpose of this book, then, is two-fold: to document the spirit of the early twentieth century as it relates to the importation of ancient bonsai plants from Japan into North America, and to show how this spirit has been miraculously preserved in the ancient ‘Chabo-hiba’ specimens that today make up the Larz Anderson Collection of the Arnold Arboretum.The Yokohama Nursery CompanyThe story of the Larz Anderson Collection really begins with events that took place in July 1853 and February 1854, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry, led two separate armadas of American “black ships” into Edo Bay, and forced the Japanese government to open its ports to trade with the United States. This ini-tial opening eventually led to establishment of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which marked the end of the Tokugawa dynasty that had ruled Japan since 1603. The Meiji government moved quickly to established new political boundaries, instituted a new land tax system, and actively encouraged the development of an economy based on manufacturing and heavy industry. In an effort to speed up this modernization pro-cess, the government paid some three thousand foreign technical experts to come to Japan to start new businesses and train Japanese citizens to run them.One of these foreign experts was Louis Boehmer, a German citizen who had immi-grated to America around 1866 and become a successful gardener in Rochester, New York. He next moved to Japan in 1872 to head a government-owned farm that was operated by American agricultural officials. After the break-up of this farm, Boehmer established his own nursery in 1882, which specialized in exporting Japanese plants to Europe and the United States. In 1890, Boehmer sold his com-pany to his German partner, Albert Unger, who operated it with his American wife, Mary, until 1908 (Creech, 1988).At roughly the same time that Boehmer sold his nursery to Unger in 1890, a group of four Japanese nurserymen established the Yokoha-ma Gardeners Association with the purpose of exporting Japanese plants to the west. One of these original founders of this cooperative was Uhei Suzuki, who had worked for Boehmer for seven years previously. In 1892, the Yokohama Gardeners Association issued their first Eng-lish catalogue that offered both green and gold Figure 2. A ‘Chabo-hiba’ wood cut from the 1892 Yokohama Nursery catalogue. Illustration courtesy of the United States National Arboretum.From Temple to Terrace 3‘Chabo-hibas’ for sale and was illustrated with a woodcut of a spectacular, 120-year-old pot-ted ‘Chabo-hiba’ specimen (Figure 2). At some point between 1893 and 1894, the Yokohama Gardeners Association was re-organized into the Yokohama Nursery Company under the leadership of Uhei Suzuki and his son Hamakichi (Elias, 2005).The Yokohama Nursery Company catalogues from the mid-1890s through the mid-1920s are impres-sive documents, written in English and beautifully illustrated with col-ored plates, line drawings, and pho-tographs of classic Japanese garden plants (see back and inside covers). Many of the colorful wood block prints were created by Tokejiro Hasegawa, one of the premier artists of his day. The 1901 catalogue con-tains a beautiful woodcut of three specimens of “Thuja obtusa var. Chabo-hiba” with the label, “the famous Japanese minimized tree, over 100 years in pots” (Figure 3). The 1905 and subsequent catalogues feature a photograph of a magnifi-cent, 400-year-old ‘Chabo-hiba’ spec-imen that was labeled “A relic of the Tokugawa Era,” (Figure 4).The Yokohama Nursery Com-pany’s listings of “Dwarfed Trees Growing in Jardinières” featured a wide variety of both conifers and flowering trees in a range of sizes, and included remarkably detailed instructions, written in flawless English, on how to care for these dwarfed trees once they arrived at the customer’s home (see page 63). Interestingly, none of the Yoko- hama Nursery catalogues used word bonsai to describe the plants they offered for sale. The section on dwarfed plants was typically only a small part of the catalogue, which often ran over eighty pages long and featured an incredible array of plants, seeds and bulbs. They sold both wild species and horticultural varieties, along with an amazing selection of pots and other decorative objects for the garden and greenhouse. Numerous photographs of the nursery operation were published in the cata-logues (Figure 5) which portray a prosperous, well-organized business. Many famous horti-Figure 3. “Thuja Obtusa, var. Chabo-hiba. Specimens of the famous Japanese minimized tree, above 100 years in pots.” Woodcut from the 1901 Yokohama Nursery catalogue.Figure 4. “A rare specimen