A Prickly Situation : ‘Artist’ Wants Bonsaists to Accept his Succulents

Rudy Lime’s thing is control. It’s everything. The passion of bonsai is an artist’s one. Lime doesn’t make art by painting pictures of what he grows. What he grows is his art. A piece of sculpture. The creation of a perfectly proportioned living miniature to express a mood and a beauty of form natural to the plant.

Lime’s place is literally busting out onto the street. The sidewalk grass across the pavement from his East San Diego house is comin’ up cactus and weird-looking prickly things that look like they should be collecting dust beside some road in Baja. They probably were. Because they and the hundreds of succulents Lime has stored around all four sides of his house are what he uses for bonsai. Which is more revolutionary than it may sound.

Bonsaists are naturally very conservative. They like to stick to pine and hardwood trees. When Lime and his Vietnamese friend Lit Phan won the Blue Ribbon in the bonsai section of the Del Mar fair in the summer of ‘85, with succulent bonsais, jaws dropped and plots were hatched.

Conservatives Upset

There was no way the conservative bonsaists were going to allow the art to be “watered down” by introducing desert cacti and tubers into the 1,700-year-old art. People called this bonsaing of succulents “perverted.” Now, before the bonsai competition at the Del Mar fair, entrants are prejudged, by a panel from the Bonsai Society, a group that will not tolerate applying the term bonsai to any other than traditional “tree” plants.

Back inside his workshop, added to the side of his house, Lime sits surrounded by bulbous tubers sprouting out little wimpy-muscled branches in various directions. The branches are wired like a young girl’s teeth, being gently but insistently persuaded to grow in swirls and loops that Rudy reckons complement the basic shape. “You see people don’t realize we are applying exactly the same techniques as with traditional trees,” he said. “Wiring the branches, extreme pruning to decide the shape of the plant: That is the whole art. So the plant grows up to be perfectly proportioned when it matures. What I do is no less natural than any traditional bonsaist.”

But Lime’s mission is bigger than that. He wants not just to get succulents accepted as true blue bonsais, but also to create a recognized American bonsai. Using American plants . . . to maybe even invent an American word to describe the art.

“We all say the Japanese word ‘bonsai,’ even though it was the Chinese who invented the technique. They called it penjing. The only reason we call it bonsai is because the GIs picked it up during the military occupation of Japan after the war. Why can’t we have our own word, too?”

A Prize-Winner

The Chinese and Kieng (Vietnamese) form came home to Lime three years ago when a Vietnamese refugee who was also a champion bonsaist in Vietnam moved in next door. Lit Phan was winning prizes in Vietnam even after the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. As late as February, 1980, he won first prize at a competition that held its finals in Hanoi. By April that year, he had chosen to flee his country across Cambodia to Thailand and eventually to California.

Now, he has taken up the art again, with regular trees, and, since he met Lime, succulents as well. He is expert in the Vietnamese style, which concentrates on creating mini-forests rather than single trees. He does the Chinese style too--much less foliage than the Japanese, highlighting “bare bones,” exposing trunk and branches and using foliage to minimally accentuate the form.

Lime admires Lit Phan’s artistic flare.

“I haven’t started forests yet,” he says. “I’ll probably do that next. But these plants have a personality you must recognize. And you can put your own personality into it, too. I am looking at the trunk and branches as the face, and the leaves as the hair. But what I really want to do is establish an American tradition. After successfully using these succulent plants from the American Southwest, we have a legitimate foundation to call it our own American bonsai.”

Lime is sitting on a high stool adjusting the wires of a Bursera fagaroides . It’s clear that these plants lead highly supervised, intensely pampered lives. But is it nurture or torture? That is the eternal question bonsaists have to answer for amateurs. Lime looks up from the plant whose life is being literally molded in his hands.

“I don’t have any children. I love them. I don’t ask them to take shapes that are not natural to them. These are my children.”