Traverse City botanic garden sells out beginner bonsai workshop

A sold-out beginner bonsai workshop at The Botanic Garden at Historic Barns Park showed how a wellness-minded public garden can do more than host a pretty Sunday program. It can pull in casual visitors, hand them tools, and send them home with a tree in training.

The class, Create Your Own Bonsai with the Botanic Garden, was set for Sunday, June 14, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the garden’s site at 1490 Red Drive in Traverse City. It was billed as a hands-on session for adults or children with adult supervision, and participants were promised all the tools and instructions they needed to leave with their own bonsai starter, not just a demonstration to watch from a distance.

That format appeared to be exactly what filled it up. The sold-out listing came on the heels of Wellness Day at The Garden, a free event running the same day from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with a lineup that included Herbal Tea Basics, a Healing Garden Tour, Labyrinth Walk, Qigong and Soul-Stirring Soundscapes. The pairing made the bonsai class feel less like a one-off workshop and more like part of a larger effort to turn the garden into a place where mindfulness, plant knowledge and outdoor learning meet.

Rod and Janet Kivell of the Sakura Bonsai Society were listed as the instructors, guiding attendees step by step through the process of making a miniature tree. The society itself traces back to 1990, when Traverse City local Eunice Corp founded it after discovering bonsai while living in Hawaii. That history gives the class a local lineage, even as the workshop format opens the door for newcomers who may be seeing the art form up close for the first time.

The society’s broader public profile helps explain why the workshop drew so much attention. Event listings describe the Sakura Bonsai Society of Northern Michigan as a group of artists of all ages and years of experience, and local event pages note that society members have previously joined Wellness Day alongside Ikebana International Chapter #165 to talk bonsai and ikebana. For beginners who missed the sold-out class, that same public-garden setting remains the clearest entry point: the garden is already using its wellness programming to make bonsai feel approachable, practical and alive in the hands of new growers.