Pacific Bonsai Museum’s BonsaiFEST! adds spring show, demos, free weekend

Pacific Bonsai Museum is turning World Bonsai Day and Mother’s Day into a two-day open house for the whole scene. BonsaiFEST! runs Saturday, May 9, and Sunday, May 10, with free admission, a Bonsai Spring Show presented by the Puget Sound Bonsai Association, and hundreds of living works of art spread across the grounds.

For newcomers, the draw is simple: this is the easiest way to see what bonsai looks like when a museum, a club show, and a market all land in one weekend. The schedule includes guided tours, games, food trucks, shopping, and bonsai-making demonstrations from local artists, with five demos each day. Those sessions run from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on May 9 and from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on May 10, mixing one-hour and two-hour formats so visitors can drop in without planning the whole day around one talk.

Collectors will have plenty to study, too. The museum says approximately 150 bonsai will be on view across the grounds, and the 2026 edition will include a mame bonsai display by PSBA member Edd Kuehn. Visit Pierce County says the festival will also feature a juried bonsai show with public Best in Show voting, plus free custom poems written on the spot by poet Alexandria Manalo. That gives the weekend a little more range than the usual club sale: there is judging, art, and actual shopping, with vendors offering bonsai, pots, and specialty plants from Asia Pacific Gardening, Inc.

The biggest institutional moment is the opening of Bonsai United, the museum’s new exhibition on bonsai traditions around the world, shaped by culture, place, and time. The museum says the exhibition will be free to the public thanks to 4Culture and will remain open through November 2027. That matters because Pacific Bonsai Museum is one of only two museums in the United States solely dedicated to bonsai, and it holds 150 trees from Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, some more than 400 years old.

The museum’s own history gives the weekend real weight. Created by Weyerhaeuser Company in 1989 for the Washington State Centennial and to honor Pacific Rim trading partners, it became the nonprofit Pacific Bonsai Museum in 2013. It now draws about 55,000 annual visitors, and BonsaiFEST! has grown into its largest annual event since 2018, with more than 6,000 visitors making the trip. Free parking is available across from the museum at the Garden Parking Lot, and adults can support the museum with a $12 suggested donation. For anyone who wants the quickest possible read on the state of bonsai in the Pacific Northwest, this is the weekend to do it.