Over the years with all the people who have either visited or survived Korea, M*A*S*H not withstanding, which by the way was a movie and a TV series about the Vietnam War, not the Korean "Police Action," I thought someone would examine Korean bonsai. Well, I've waited long enough and after trying to get people to make domestic bonsai pots and bonsai tools, I decided I should learn to make the pots and tools myself, which I did. The same can be said about Korean bonsai. However, I've no doubt that all manner of travelers will come out of the woodwork and relate their experiences discovering Korean bonsai kicking my rarely humble efforts into a cocked boshi.

Korea had been part of the "Pan-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" since the early 20th century, and was such until the end of World War II. Korea still shows numerous features of Japanese influence. To gaijin like me, the Koreans refer to artistic, sculptured, container plants as bonsai, but the locals, the worthies, and the in-group call it punejay. Whether bonsai migrated from China to Korea to Japan as was the case with many cultural, religious, and political factors, or it sprang full-form in all its pristine, metaphorical symbolism independently from all that preceded it is not for me to posit. I tend to feel, however, that bonsai has not been a cultural back formation and hence was not brought to Korea from Japan. Then too, the purists, etymologists, semanticists and other dreary drudges will wish to define terms -- ho hum.

My plan is not to write a James A. Fitzpatrick travelogue: "As the sun pulls away from the pier and our ship sinks slowly in the west, we bid fond farewell to the land of the morning calm."

All the traffic problems, a distressing ignorance of the language, geography and food that burns twice or three times a feeding will not be covered, nor will the dozens of nurseries, suiseki shops, potteries and memories of a brief, but cold February in 1951.

I recall the overall effects I first felt when seeing Korean bonsai of great age. The trees exhibited a consummate growing skill, rustic, natural styling and were all displayed in an uncluttered, free and creative fashion. To wit: Mr. Lee, a 77-year-old bonsai gardener who had spent some years at Mr. Kato's bonsai nursery in Omiya Koen during the 1930's, epitomized all that is Korean bonsai. My visit to Mr. Lee's garden occurred in late October and knowing my own weakness towards summer's end, I expected to see burned leaves, lace bug damage on the azaleas, scorched stewardia leaves, yellow yews and on and on. You, dear readers, who have lived through the ravages of a hot, dry, windy summer, know only too well how fervent the hope is that all the leaves will either drop or be superseded by next year's needles, covering the atrocities of the previous year.

My beady, cynical, critical brain developed synapse overload. I ran from tree to tree convinced that somewhere Mr. Lee must have a tree that had suffered from apprentice indifference -not so, not one; not even the leaves of the Acer ginnala showed any signs of their genetically given order to be ugly at one time or another. All his Korean hornbeams sat there, insolent from the buttress to the tiniest twig, the late afternoon sun filtering through the pink, yellow, red infinitely by colored and hued leaves.

Throughout the garden, after I had calmed down to the point of ecstasy, I saw varieties of trees and shrubs not usually seen in bonsai culture. Collected yews, junipers, (not shimpaku), hornbeams with trunks from an inch to two and three feet in diameter; and what shall I say about the Chinese quince; trunks no human could create, growth so crisp and clean, fruit so vibrant, so rich. The trunks twisted and curved showing no wiring marks; trunks with vivid, multicolored bark peeking from curls and shags of exfoliating bark.

And then the little trees: the multiple branched beauty berries cascade like a purple forsythia with a fertility problem. Throughout the garden sat larches, a few inches tall but with flat, expanding buttresses, not unlike a trident maple grown on a flat surface for many years. Shohin-size collected hornbeams, their seeds cascading, snuggled under the larger trees like a friendly cat ready to pounce.

Since so many of the collected trees showed such great age, dead wood, insect and termite holes, and blasted terminals and apexes dominated many compositions. There seemed to be more freedom in the selection of what dead effects were to remain on the tree and less "artificial" sculpturing. A crossing, bleached branch often times was not cut off not because of some doctrinaire rule said it should, but kept because it looked good to the artist, not the critic.

Someday I'm going to vent my spleen about all the authoritative, non-artist grower critics of several nationalities who want to reduce everything to absolutes, taking all the fun and delight of our art and replacing it with dullness, dreariness.

If you wish to find fault, it is there for even the most callow observer, but at Mr. Lee's garden, only the pleasant, placid, and peaceful hold sway. He has no need to be anything but what he is: a consummate artist of sculptured, artistic, container grown trees of greater or lesser age or to use the oft spoken: Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 43, 44.