This is not who I expected. He is friendly almost to a fault and meticulous in every swipe, the ground strewn not with piles of things, but with a mist of tiny flakes. Each decision seems a matter of life and death. On the 19th of January I wrote something about him in Topiary, pointing out that topiary is not just animal shapes, as I had thought, but all shapes, including geometrical. Of course, I had no idea who he was. I concluded that what he had accomplished was something mildly disturbing, “because [he] wanted [the plants] to be something other than they naturally are.” I suppose I’ve felt that way about plants for a very long time.

I remember a disturbing trend when I was young that involved trimming olive trees into balls or ovals or pompoms. Turning lush, leafy trees into sideshows. Olive trees can be held back by limiting their upward growth, but it takes a very skilled tree trimmer to hide his work. When the work is done, the tree is just as random and lush as it was when he began, but maybe a year or two younger. I used to think that people who made topiaries out of olive trees should be shot.

That’s a hard prejudice to overcome.

On the other hand, I helped my father turn elastic young pine trees into shapes that were compatible with Japanese style gardens. It was a process that required patience. Thick rubber coated wire was used to guide the branches. Unnecessary needles were picked. The tree grew slowly into a work of art. It became itself, or so we thought. Of course it had something to do with Zen, or Zen had something to do with it. But everything seemed very right.

So when I used the word “bonsai” to describe a shrub in a yard on my walk, I was misusing the word. Bonsais are very small. They are miniature trees in shallow pots. We, of course, were limiting the growth of small pine trees, so in an extended sense we were making bonsais, I suppose. Our Japanese vocabulary was limited. But when I wrote Bonsai and Bonsai 2, I thought that a huge tree had been made small, when in fact a shrub had been nurtured to grow very large. But it had not grown wild. It was like the olive tree that had been trimmed, but more severely.

The man I watched trimming this shrub last December behaved very much like the man in this photograph. He was friendly almost to a fault and meticulous in every swipe. Rather than with hedge sheers, however, he worked with a small hand tool, and other than the nature of their output, they might well have been the same person. Two gardens, one with and one without Zen. A load of similarities, but not exactly the same.