Common Name: WHITE CEDAR
Botanical Name: Thuja occidentalis
Year first potted as a bonsai: about 1983
Estimated age when first potted: 150 years
Early styling by: Elsie MacCready – Jack Wikle
Donor: MacCready family
This white cedar is a tree Elsie MacCready and her husband, Doug found up north somewhere. “Up north” was their term. I’m pretty sure now that it was actually someplace in the Upper Peninsula, maybe along the shore of Lake Superior. They found a group of white cedar trees that had been obviously growing there quite a while but weren’t getting big because of the conditions where they were growing. And they brought back a number of them. This tree is one of two they collected which ended up with is at Hidden Lake Gardens after Elsie’s death.
This is one of two that Elsie kept. Then when Elsie passed away and her collection was given to Hidden Lake Gardens, this is one of the trees that was part of that gift. And there’s another white cedar out at Hidden Lake Gardens with the same history; same collecting expedition. When visitors come out to the gardens to see the bonsai, it’s not uncommon for someone to ask, what’s the oldest tree you have here? And those two white cedars we have from Elsie are pretty clearly the oldest. When I first saw those white cedars, I thought. These are old.
That was my reaction. I’ll bet they might be 60 years old. Then some years later, taking a branch we didn’t want off of one of those white cedars. . . maybe it died in the wrong place . . . we counted the rings, and my memory is that there were 60 rings in the branch that was about three quarters of an inch in diameter. And the trunk was much larger than that branch. So I’m quite confident now that this tree is 150 years old. It could be twice that old in actual age.
And, as you look at it, this is one of those trees where you’ve got live wood that is still growing, still changing, thickening every year. But the dead wood, which was dead when Elsie found the tree, pretty much stays the same except there’s a tendency, especially near the ground for dead wood to gradually rot away.
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