Page 72 - BSAM 2016 Q3

Top left; For decades in Vero Beach, the fourth Sunday of each month was Bonsai under the Oaks, a free seminar that Smith gave for all interested.
Top right; Smith styled this enormous forest of dwarf F. Benjamina during one of his Bonsai Under the Oaks workshops in 2007.
Middle left; Smith trims one of the Portulacarias at Heathcote, circa 2014.
Bottom; Smith defoliated one of his Salicifolias for this photo, circa 1990.
Robert Kempinski has seen trees styled by Smith in Germany, Canada, South America, India, Japan, China and many more countries.
His contributions to bonsai art and cultivation are myriad. He was instrumental in creating the banyan style and pioneered the use of hardened clay particles. He traded clippings of exotic species from collectors around the world, and grew them in greenhouses un- der time-controlled misting systems.
He introduced numerous species to bonsai cultiva- tion in the United States, including the small-leaf jade (Portulacaria afra). Several top examples of this spe- cies can be seen in the Heathcote collection, including the gallery’s logo tree.
Smith was famous for his generosity to aspiring art- ists, both with material from his nursery, and more importantly, with endless hours of his time, teaching, coaching and trimming trees.
Born in Alton, Illinois on September 25, 1925 to William Arnett Smith and Elizabeth (Bettie Mary Reis) Smith, the family relocated with their infant son to Evansville Indiana where Smith was baptized at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and attended Reitz Memorial High School.
Smith enlisted in the U. S. Navy on the 6th of April 1943; therea er, he attended Newbury Collage as a ca- det before being attached to Admiral William Halsey’s Paci c eet aboard the USS Attu CVE 102. A er the war, Jim and Wilma married at St Benedict’s Church on the 6th of September 1947.
Smith began his plastering contractor’s business un- der the name of Dura-Stone Co. while in Evansville before relocating family and business to Vero Beach Florida in 1956, where he began experimenting with the tropical plants found in Florida.
e fall of the housing market in the early 1970s forced Jim to turn at least one of his passions into a family-supporting income. Phasing out his plastering business he successfully ventured into an unexpected interest—numismatics. J & W (Jim and Wilma) Rare
Coins was born and a brief career dealing in rare coins occupied his time and provided an income. But in- creasingly his love of botany took hold.
In those early years he irted with cactus and or- chids, but dreams of perfect trees in miniature soon eclipsed all else. Durastone plastering became the strangely named Durastone Wholesale Bonsai Nurs- ery and by the mid-1970s bonsai had became his hobby, his career and his refuge.
Smith admitted that the locale played a role in his success—you almost couldn’t kill a plant in Florida, he said. e growing season was three to four times as long in Vero Beach as it is in most parts of the country, and his nursery was lled with potted trees with fat trunks and spreading crowns that looked ancient but were only a few years old.
Durastone became a bonsai Mecca for novice and master alike. Folks would arrive from half-way across the country and ll up a trailer with Banyan-shaped cus, twisted-trunk Brazilian Raintree, and owering trees like the Water Jasmine, Wrightia religiosa. Jim would stop work, grab a root beer, settle in a chair under the massive spreading banyan out front and talk trees, politics or the world situation. His personal ex- periences with war made him a passionate paci st and ardent political progressive.
e big banyan, some variant of F. Retusa, was jok- ingly called “ e Tree of Knowledge” by longtime stu- dents, because of all the talks that Smith gave under its boughs. He said it was never supposed to grow there— it started out in a plastic nursery pot, put its roots down, and burst through, growing into a massive tree with a six-foot trunk and a crown 80 feet across.
In the bonsai world, individual trees can be just as well known as the artist. Perhaps Smith’s best-known tree was an immense banyan with a crown that spread ve feet across. A portrait of it hangs in his Vero Beach home. A collector saw it and tried to buy it over and over again. Smith repeatedly demurred. One day, he said, he agreed and named a sum that he thought would silence the collector—$25,000. To Smith’s shock, the collector readily agreed. e amount is a pittance for a great tree in Japan, but may have been a record in the U.S.
It has been said that bonsai is the only art where the
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