There are other bonsai YouTubers, including Tennessee native Bjorn Bjorholm, who was once called “the Brad Pitt of Bonsai” by Architectural Digest, probably thanks to his wavy blond hair and angular jaw. But Bjorholm, who trained for six years under a bonsai master in Osaka, Japan, has a teaching style that felt far above me. “When designing a coniferous bonsai,” Bjorholm says in one clip, “there is a general process utilized to determine the tree’s front, angle, branch placement, line, flow, and directionality. This process is largely influenced by value judgments regarding composite design, and those value judgments are themselves influenced by the larger cultural context in which contemporary bonsai art exists in Japan.” I turned off the video. Saunders’s passionate one-man-with-a-handy-cam performance, in comparison, feels like watching a high-school science teacher who can’t hide his elation with electron transfer. His videos are even studded with unintentional Tao-esque proverbs, including “I can always grow a branch thicker, but you can’t make them thinner.”
