The specimen in the entry has lived more than 300 years as a tree, but only 80 as a bonsai. “The value is not age. Age allows you to have a trunk with much more character, but the true value is the design, the shape it has”, explains Luis Vallejo (Madrid, 69 years old), owner of the collection to which he has dedicated more than four decades and which is now part of the Luis Vallejo Bonsai Museum, in Alcobendas (Madrid). Age is not important, but time is essential. Bonsai is a word of Japanese origin that literally means good (tray) and said (tree) and consists of the art of growing trees and plants by controlling their size. Compared to other works of art whose interest lies in keeping them unchanged, what attracts bonsai is witnessing the subtle changes that transform it thanks to the passing of the seasons and the patience of its keeper. “You are modeling this all your life”, Vallejo corroborates.
He doesn’t say it just to say it. His first bonsai dates back to the sixties, in his father’s nursery, when he was a 14-year-old boy. “I have one left from that time that is around,” he recalls. There are species to which he is particularly fond and does not intend to change “except for extreme necessity”, but the space in the installation is limited and the collection continues to grow. “Occasionally, I find a specimen in the bush and I bring it with me or when I go to Japan I return with one. But now we are in the phase of slimming down the collection ”, he admits. As there is no space for all the works that Vallejo has collected throughout his life -which include both bonsai and the pedestals, tables and other sculptures that accompany them-, there are currently 100 works on display and another “hundred and pico” saved, repairing or toggling.
Walking the paths of the small open-air museum is an exercise in relaxation. You can hear the birds singing and smell the aroma given off by the leaves of the linden tree, one of the few trees in space that maintains its natural size. “This is the greatest antidepressant on earth,” Vallejo says, breathing in under its branches. He confirms that all trees have a story and that of some is very special. “This is Gabriel García Márquez’s”, he explains, holding in his hands a small Japanese elm shaped like an inverted broom. The Nobel Prize for Literature was given to former Prime Minister Felipe González ―also a firm lover of bonsai and a close friend of Vallejo for decades― at the end of the eighties, after a visit to the Japanese country to interview director Akira Kurosawa about the possibility to adapt the novel to the cinema The Autumn of the Patriarchaccording to the current custodian of the bonsai: “He bought it in a nursery in the middle of Tokyo and brought it to him in a suitcase when it was just a stick with three branches.”
Some of these stories are told in to the pines the wind (Turner, 2023), a book that presents the trees in the Vallejo collection not from botanical science, but from poetics and the time of their design and creation. “I wanted to express an idea that is not only educational, that is simply expressive”, comments the collector. This influence of the passage of time on bonsai is reflected through 101 photographs taken over three years by Fernando Maquieira, to which, in the image register, is added the preamble by Carmen Ballvé. The one with the word opens with the presentation of Felipe González. “The last time I saw him was when I brought him the first copy of the special edition. We had a drink and he loved it”, recalls Vallejo, whose sketchbooks complete the book’s narration together with the story drawn by the poet José María Parreño. “It is a book that excites because it is full of evocations”, he guarantees.
In addition to being the author and owner of this collection of bonsai, Vallejo is a landscape designer with a long career. Among his many national and international projects, the gardens of the Royal Mansour hotel in Marrakech stand out ―commissioned by King Mohaamed VI―, those of the Río Hortega University Hospital in Valladolid or those of the Banco Santander Financial City and the Castellana 81 tower, in Madrid, as well as those dedicated to private estates in Spain, Italy, Israel, Morocco and the Middle East. The calm that radiates as he puts on a hat to protect himself from the sun during the visit contrasts with the vivacity that his busy schedule demands. “Tomorrow I’m going to Morocco, then to the Canary Islands, the following week I’m going to Tel Aviv and the next, maybe, I’ll travel to Sicily for an exhibition. The following week I go back to Marrakech, then to Rabat… in one year I calculated and I spent almost 180 days a year abroad, which is outrageous ”, he admits.
All this hustle and bustle makes him appreciate even more the aura of peace that emanates from the museum, which is maintained thanks to a small team of people who help take care of it when he is not around. “I love this site,” he confirms. However, the future of his bonsai collection, considered one of the best in the world both for the specimens and for the way they are displayed, is not guaranteed. The maintenance costs of a collection as fragile as this one are very high and the institutional support is practically nil, according to Vallejo. “My company is the one that covers all expenses except a symbolic amount that the City Council gives us. The fate of the collection is going to be either that this is fixed or that we go elsewhere”, laments the landscape designer, who links the permanence of his life’s work to the possible constitution of a sponsorship or foundation to stop depending on external help.
The Luis Vallejo Bonsai Museum can be visited from Tuesday to Friday from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and on weekends and holidays this schedule is extended to the afternoons, from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. When his multiple trips give him a break and he is in Madrid, Vallejo likes to visit him on Saturdays, with the rest of the people. “I come to relax and enjoy, but I can’t help but pay attention to what to do next,” confesses the director and curator of the space. Because although it may not seem like it, everything is placed in a strictly intentional way so that light, shadow, humidity… move each figure in a certain way. “Everything is changing for better or for worse, as it happens to us. Sometimes they say that they are being forced, but that is not the case, they are accompanying a living being and expressing themselves artistically through it, ”he reflects.
Mondays, like this one in which Vallejo is open for visits, is the only day of the week that the museum closes its doors to the public. Even so, he has taken the opportunity to invite some friends to eat in his garden before embarking on his next trip. “I spend so much time outside that when I come back and open the door, my children ask their mother who is that man,” he jokes. His other great legacy, the bonsai, await him patiently at each return. Each one on his pedestal, apparently motionless, but gradually transforming with each ray of sunlight.
Love has agitated my senses / as the wind throws itself into the pines on the mountain, reads the verse of Sappho’s poem that has inspired the name of the book. A book where now, whatever happens with the collection, his bonsai have been immortalized forever.
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