National Bonsai & Penjing Garden, Canberra

Today I will take you to the National Bonsai & Penjing Collection of Australia. This garden is part of the National Arboretum Canberra.

This National Bonsai & Penjing Collection is a partnership venture between the government and the Australian Bonsai Community.

If we look at the history of this bonsai collection, it all started in the year 2008 when it was opened in Commonwealth Park, but it was moved to its present location in 2013 at the National Arboretum Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory.

This place can exhibit 120 bonsai plants at a time, but there were 75 trees on display when we visited the place during last summer.

Most of these trees are basically the traditional trees and mostly a collection of Australian native species, including.

We all know that bonsai is basically an art form from Japan, so this bonsai garden is also inspired by Japanese bonsai and moss gardens, which you can witness in this plant.

Plants include Scleranthus biflorus and uniflorus, local mosses, Lomandra longifolia 'Tanika,' Macrozamia moorei, and Cycas revoluta. The Japanese maple is Acer palmatum ‘Dissectum Inabe Shidare.’

As we all know, Australia has a great range of Banksia serrata and Eucalyptus camaldulensis trees, so you will see a number of these trees in this garden.

Most of these trees are owned by the park management, but the Australian Bonsai Community that manages these plants has borrowed a few of these from different parts of Australia on a time-return basis.

The artists and owners try to continually change the plants so that frequent visitors to this bonsai park get a different experience on every visit, as the bonsai collection is within the National Arboretum, where a number of tourists visiting Canberra and locals visit for various other reasons.

Besides these bonsai plants, the area has a collection of other plants just outside the glass house where these bonsai plants are on display.

Once you enter this glasshouse with such a wonderful collection of bonsai plants, you find them fascinating as they grow with age, but the artists managing these plants keep them in a limited size.