Potomac Bonsai Festival to mark museum's 50th anniversary weekend

The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum will take center stage this World Bonsai Day weekend as the Potomac Bonsai Festival returns to the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, DC, with a full slate of exhibitions, live demonstrations, hands-on workshops, children’s activities and vendors from across the country.

The Potomac Bonsai Association has scheduled the festival for May 8 through 10, 2026, and is leaning hard into the museum’s status as one of the most important bonsai destinations in North America. The Friday preview will include vendors and bonsai displays, and the official opening ceremony is set for Saturday at 10:30 a.m. with bonsai leaders and dignitaries in attendance. The museum is free and open to the public, and its Japanese, Chinese and North American pavilions, plus its suiseki collection, give the weekend a scale that smaller club shows cannot match.

This year’s festival also carries a double anniversary: the 50th anniversary of the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum and the 250th anniversary of the United States. That symbolism reaches back to July 1976, when the Nippon Bonsai Association formally presented 53 bonsai trees to the U.S. National Arboretum as a bicentennial gift. National Bonsai Foundation materials say the original gift also included viewing stones, helping launch what supporters describe as the first public bonsai museum in the world.

Two names that will draw serious attention are Jonas Dupuich and Jack Sustic. Dupuich, a California-based bonsai artist, teacher, grower, author and creator of Bonsai Tonight, trained under Boon Manakitivipart and has worked in bonsai for more than 25 years, with a reputation for propagation and development of Japanese black pine. The festival lists his workshops for Saturday, May 9, at 9 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., alongside beginner sessions at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Sustic brings a different kind of draw. The Potomac Bonsai Association identifies him as a former Bonsai Museum Curator and the founder of a long-established study group, tying the weekend directly to the institution it is celebrating. For attendees, that mix of museum heritage, high-level instruction and a vendor market stocked with pre-bonsai, styled specimens, pots, accessories, soil and tools makes this more than a local show. It is a rare chance to see a landmark collection and a working bonsai community in the same place, on the same weekend.