Winter may seem like a bad time to visit a museum of living plants, but curator Aarin Packard at the Pacific Bonsai Museum in Federal Way said it’s one of the best times to see details of the craft.

In deciduous bonsai that have lost their leaves, visitors can see the “bare skeleton branch structure, which in bonsai is highly valued. You can see all the effort that went into the pruning and the twigginess of that kind of bonsai,” Packard said.

The coniferous bonsai on the other hand “provide a really great visual contrast with that evergreen, stately comparison with the bare deciduous,” Packard added.

The Pacific Bonsai Museum is actually one of only two bonsai museums in the country. There are more opportunities to see bonsai than that, but other displays are classified as collections,

See Full Page