The bonsai expert and nurseryman on his journey from writing speeches for Margaret Thatcher to demystifying the ancient art of sculpting live plants
WORDS PAULA McWATERS PORTRAIT RICHARD BLOOM
Peter Chan’s knowledge of bonsai is self-taught. “Many people, when they see a Chinese face, think ‘Oh, you must have learned the art of bonsai from your father or grandfather’. No way. I taught myself and everything I have learned has been through my own experimenting.”
Not that Peter keeps his 57 years of bonsai experience and expertise to himself. On the contrary, he runs Britain’s leading bonsai nursery, Herons, on a seven-acre site in Lingfield, Surrey, and shares his knowledge worldwide through his books, workshops and how-to videos. “Creating and teaching are what I love. YouTube has been a revelation. I only started my channel four years ago and I have built up a following of more than 452,000,” he says. “I want to make bonsai simple. There should be no mystique.”
At 83, Peter is enjoying the increased attention that his videos have brought him. He says he is shy, but he is not afraid to promote his skills and he comes to life on camera, in a colourful Hawaiian shirt, demonstrating with great dexterity the shaping, pruning and wiring that is required to produce a fine bonsai specimen. “It is living sculpture with plants, and it’s so satisfying. You need patience and calmness. By doing it you learn to look, to appreciate the beauty.”
Many of his students tell him how bonsai has helped them through trauma and difficulties. His own life has had its share of twists and turns, with fate leading him to move to the UK from India, where he was born and brought up, third generation Chinese. He had just finished a degree in electrical engineering at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology when the Sino-Indian war broke out in 1962 and his family had to flee to evade internment by the Indian government. “While most of my university contemporaries went to America, I came to England because my pen friend Dawn, who I’d been writing to since our teens, was here.”
Peter’s love of bonsai started four years later, when he and Dawn married and bought their first home, a flat in south London with a big balcony, where Peter’s desire to grow things and the necessity to raise them in pots coincided. He learned pottery at adult education classes and then “plucked a few seedlings, tried a few things and that’s how my knowledge of bonsai was built”. The very first pot that he made is still proudly d
