Peter Chan has posted the first video from his August trip to Chicago on his Herons Bonsai YouTube channel. Peter was our guest artist and judge for the 2026 Destination Asia show at the Morton Arboretum, and Part One follows him from the UK to Chicago and through the bonsai collection at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Part One is nearly an hour with curator Chris Baker in the Botanic Garden’s bonsai courtyards and working benches. Peter is smitten with the Sawara cypress forest, trades notes on soil, feeding, and wire, and meets the garden’s bonsai assistant, PSBS member Elle Nieto-Brodnick of Bonsai Journey, who took home ribbons at Destination Asia. Follow Elle on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Show chair Craig Cronquist and Emily Cronquist make a cameo around the ten-minute mark.
The Sawara cypress forest that stops Peter in his tracks has a Chicago pedigree. Chris notes it was donated to the garden in 1996 by Alex Alexander, the retired florist who founded the Midwest Bonsai Society in 1967. A 1992 Chicago Tribune profile of that year’s Mid-America show describes Alexander as a self-styled bonsai purist who had studied flower arranging in Japan, once kept some 300 trees, favored the Chinese clip-and-grow approach over wiring, and refused to enter his own trees in competition. Judging them, he said, was “like putting a child in a beauty contest.” The same article covers the visit of Japanese master Susumu Nakamura, whose donated trees Chris points out throughout the tour.
Peter’s channel only allows playback on YouTube itself, so the video opens there. We’ll link the rest of the series here as Peter posts it.
Catch up on Peter’s visit
- Peter Chan Announced as 2026 Guest Artist — how the visit came together
- 2026 Destination Asia Show — Ribbon and Trophy Winners — the trees Peter selected as judge
- 2026 Annual Show — People’s Choice Top 10 — the visitors’ favorites
- August 5, 2026 Meeting Recap — show results and wrap-up (members only)
Get the Peter Chan Edition Hawaiian shirt
Peter tours the Botanic Garden in a Hawaiian shirt, and you can get one too. The club designed a special-edition Hawaiian shirt to mark his visit, patterned with bonsai, bamboo, and the PSBS logo. It is in the PSBS Merch Store and ships directly to you.
