Como Conservatory Hosts Mother’s Day Bonsai Show in Historic Collection

A Mother’s Day trip to Como will give families something better than the usual brunch circuit: a close look at living miniature trees inside the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory, where the Minnesota Bonsai Society will stage its annual show on May 9 and 10 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The setup works because it is both a public outing and a real bonsai event. The society says the show will be open to the public, members will be on hand to answer questions, and the exhibit will have no judging. That makes it less like a competition bench and more like an invitation to stand in front of good trees, ask how they were wired, pruned, and kept alive, and decide whether bonsai belongs in your own weekend routine.

The setting matters just as much as the trees. Como says the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory houses the largest public bonsai collection in the upper Midwest, and the first trees in that collection trace back to a 1987 donation of bonsai that had been displayed at and owned by First Bank System, Inc. The collection sits in the Ordway Gardens, so the Mother’s Day show lands inside an established display, not a temporary pop-up. Visitors will be seeing the event in the context of a permanent collection that already gives Como a strong bonsai identity.

That permanence is exactly why the show should draw both newcomers and the usual club crowd. The Minnesota Bonsai Society was founded in 1971 to inspire participation and appreciation in bonsai, and the group says this exhibit is meant to share trees, inspire newcomers, and recruit interest in classes and membership. For a society that is 100% volunteer-based, the show is also a practical public face for the club, turning curiosity into a conversation instead of leaving bonsai locked behind glass.

The broader Como investment gives the weekend extra weight. Como Friends says the $18.8 million Campaign for Como will create year-round display space for the bonsai collection, while the Ordway Gardens project added 2,267 square feet of glass-enclosed interpretive display space and a 2,850-square-foot outdoor terrace. That kind of infrastructure turns a seasonal display into something with real staying power.

The Minnesota Bonsai Society also has deep roots in public exhibition. It first participated in the Minnesota State Fair in 1975, only four years after the club was founded, and it has long used high-traffic venues to put bonsai in front of people who might never seek it out. That tradition runs through Como too, where longtime figures such as Ken Ellis, Mike Porcaro, and Robert J. Poor connect the show to a larger Minnesota bonsai history that reaches from volunteer work to university art history and the Chinese art form of penjing.