Chicago Botanic Garden offers bonsai workshop on forest plantings

A forest planting strips bonsai down to the parts people can see at a glance: spacing, movement, height and the way a handful of trees can read as a landscape. Chicago Botanic Garden is leaning into that with a workshop built around one of the most approachable and visually dramatic styles in the art form.

The class is set for Wednesday, April 22, from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Bonsai Studio in the Grainger Center. It costs $149 for members and $187 for nonmembers, and the Garden says all supplies are included. Participants will discuss grouping styles before building a small bonsai forest to take home, and they can bring small accent plants or rocks if they want to add more depth to the composition.

That hands-on finish matters. A single tree can take years of wiring, clip-and-grow decisions and patience before the structure starts to make sense. A forest planting gives a faster read on the basics because the whole composition has to work at once. If the trunks are too even, the scene feels flat. If the spacing is cramped, the grouping loses air. If the angles fight each other, the planting stops reading as a stand of trees. That is why the style is such a useful entry point, and why it can teach broader bonsai principles without feeling like homework.

Chris Baker, the Garden’s curator of bonsai, will lead the session. Baker has been studying and working on bonsai for more than 16 years, and his own path started with a 2010 encounter with Jack Sustic at the U.S. National Arboretum’s Bonsai and Penjing Museum in Washington, D.C., where he asked to volunteer and later redirected his career. That background gives the workshop more weight than a typical paid class. It ties the session to a practitioner who came up through direct experience, not just theory.

The setting reinforces that. Chicago Botanic Garden says its bonsai collection includes nearly 300 trees and 160 different taxa, displayed in two courtyards from mid-April to October. Garden materials also describe the collection as 185 bonsai in 20 styles and more than 40 kinds of plants, and the Regenstein School offers 1,500 classes, workshops, programs and events. The Garden’s bonsai calendar already includes spring offerings such as Spring Bonsai Care and Soil Science and Bonsai Show Preparation Workshop, which makes the forest class part of a larger, serious teaching program rather than a one-off demonstration.

For anyone who wants a composition that looks finished on day one but still teaches real bonsai design, this is the rare workshop that delivers both.