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By David De Groot, USAPhotos courtesy David De GrootA great frustration in my 44 years of working with bonsai is the fact that in any bookstore or library I have ever entered, any book on bonsai will be fled in either the “Gardening” or “Hobby” section – but not in the “Art” section. Part of the problem is that our medium – the living plant – is not transformed in the way other artistic mediums are transformed. Painters do not generally try to make their daub of paint look like simply a larger daub of paint. Sculptors generally do not try to carve a block of marble so it looks like another block of marble. Te medium is always transformed into an image of something far diferent than itself—an image of bowl of fruit, or a human fgure, or a non-specifc abstraction. Te bonsai artist, however, starts with a tree, and transforms it into – an image of a tree. Granted the image is of a diferent tree, larger, older, perhaps more dramatic, but to the uninitiated, it is a step too small. It still looks like gardening.