East Side Stories: How 15,000 trees turned into a life-long endeavour for Hawthorn’s bonsai master

Walking through the doors of Hawthorn’s Bonsai Farm, you can feel the hustle and bustle of trams and cars racing just outside fading away.

The face of Melbourne’s oldest bonsai nursery – 78-year-old Lindsay Farr – spoke to the Eastern Melburnian about his life-long devotion to the art of bonsai, a Chinese practice dating back more than 2,000 years ago.

✂️ What is bonsai? Dating back to about 700 AD in China and later introduced and refined by the Japanese, bonsai is the art of growing and shaping miniature trees in containers.

🎞️ 74 years ago: According to Farr, his love for horticulture comes from family: His grandfather owned a nursery in Canterbury East and his father a nursery on Croydon’s Main Street. Alongside this – and perhaps surprisingly – he credits the film The Wizard of Oz.

• 🗣️ “There was a scene where a tree came to life animated and reached out and grabbed the Tin Man,” Farr told the Eastern Melburnian. “I found that terrifying as a five year old, and I fled from the theater in terror. But that very week, the ladies who formed the Victorian Bonsai Society came into my dad's nursery in Croydon and I looked at the pictures in their books and I said ‘This is for me’.”

🎷🪈 The music man: However, Farr didn’t enter the leafy world of his father and grandfather straight away, instead spending 15 years of his life as a musician. Farr played the saxophone and flute for bands like Daddy Cool in Melbourne and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in Boston.

Farr said he turned back to his roots after he began a family and started thinking about his children’s future.

• 🗣️ “I wanted to provide a stable environment for [my children] to grow up in and I didn't feel that a traveling musician was going to be the best way to do that,” said Farr.

Thus, the Bonsai Farm began.

🌳 Back to basics: Alongside his wife Marietta, Farr planted about 15,000 trees in a property at Kalorama to start the farm.

• “Everyone thought I was crazy,” said Farr. “Of those 15,000, there's less than 50 left here now.”

👨‍🏫 Teaching the world: Farr began sharing what he had learnt from bonsai to others during the 1990s before being approached to film what is still the first and only TV series about bonsai – The Way of Bonsai – in 1999. He also developed a web series – Lindsay Farr’s World of Bonsai – in 2005.

🛑 No breaks: One of the hardest things was keeping all of the trees healthy during harsher and harsher summers, according to Farr.

• 🗣️“For 50 years, they haven't missed out on a drink on a hot day,” said Farr. “Rather than a love, I’d say bonsai is a commitment.”

😮‍💨 Simple meanings: Surrounded by the fruits of his labour, Farr said he believed the main lesson he had taken away was the “usefulness of the useless”.

• “The use of it was for the human condition in sustaining through hard times,” said Farr. “Water overcomes all things and to come out this morning and water the trees, that soothed my troubled soul somewhat,” said Farr.