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This tree,
it's one of the highest trees in this neighborhood.
This is the one eagles sit on top of.
Look at this! Look at this! Look how big it is.
This is, this is ivy, babe.
This is not the tree.
This is not the root.
This is a vine.
Right here.
This tree has been alive longer than Nana--
- Me? - Oh, definitely than you.
Nana, Papa.
Everyone you know, and then their grandparents.
I know George Washington.
How does all the ivy stay strong
if all the ivy is taking everything?
- How do-- - It's gobbling everything up.
All the nutrients, all the water,
it's just gobbling it all up.
Ivy's killing everything we love back here, Gil.
- Is it cut? - Yeah.
That's it. We did it.
Straight back here.
Trees tell the truth.
And they have stories to tell.
About a man who plants a seed during a time of darkness.
A boy hidden in a forest.
Another boy who falls in love.
A woman who makes trees immortal.
We move through time.
But trees stand still.
Tall trees.
Tiny trees.
Family trees.
Like us, they are mighty.
They are vulnerable.
- Unlike us, they cannot escape. - Woo-hoo!
To say my job is to make bonsai trees,
it's not enough for me.
There's no reason to wanna be here
doing this right now. Right?
Like, I didn't come here 'cause I thought it was gonna be fun.
I came here 'cause I wanted to know.
I wanna know what this is gonna become.
The perception of bonsai is that
we're recreating nature in miniature.
But the reality of bonsai is that
you have to understand the physical environment,
the influences that are acting on it,
or else you can never get it right.
I'm not in the game of defiling a tree for my own...
...curiosity.
For these trees, as far as they're concerned,
I am the wind.
I am the elevation.
I am the temperature.
I am the intensity of the sun.
So all the branches move in this direction
except for this one low piece over here.
And you have this ridge, and you have that angle,
and all the deadwood is on that side,
and all the living tissue's on this side.
But nobody knows the actual story
'cause it's 4,800 years old.
Hm.
This is intelligence on a level
that we don't consider intelligence.
Bristlecone pines,
as the oldest living thing on earth,
they're almost a religion.
Somewhere along the evolution of mankind,
there has been a constant connection to the environment.
And it has always been, from my perspective,
the tree as the connecting organism.
We need them, we love them, we appreciate them,
and they form the fundamental foundations of our memories,
our culture, and our behavior.
And we're so quick to forget them.
Humans have this narrative arc over a hundred years.
And trees have that kind of narrative arc
over thousands of years.
But, we deteriorate. They get better with age.
TV host 1: An heir to one of America's
largest timber companies has died.
George Weyerhaeuser Sr. died over the weekend at 95.
He's seen here with Ronald Reagan in the '80s.
radio host 1: George Weyerhaeuser Sr. was the fourth-generation CEO
of the Seattle-based company that bears his family's name.
TV host 2: Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,
George led Weyerhaeuser for decades.
radio host 2: He served as CEO of Weyerhaeuser during the time
the company started a high-yield forestry model
that greatly increased the amount of logging.
radio host 3: A business legend, and a wonderful human being.
Just a great guy. George Weyerhaeuser,
rest in peace, and thank you for many years of service.
Okay, you've got two steps down here.
Oh boy. That would be easy to take a dive over.
It would be, yep.
Now, they're gonna want you
to sit in that chair right there, okay?
Just put this here.
So, do you recall having someone put a camera on you?
Put a what on?
A camera on you, and, and talk to you a little bit?
When an independent historian sits down,
not the company-paid historian, 10 or 15 years from now
and writes the history of Weyerhaeuser,
what would you hope they would say about George Weyerhaeuser?
What would you like to be remembered for?
Each step of the way,
I'm not sure who was pullin' what strings, ya know.
To this day, I can't tell you.
My impression is that much of what later evolved
in my company experience was accidental.
When push came to shove on what should you log,
where and when, and with what logging methods,
supplying the mills was at the top end of the scales.
Regardless of season or whatever,
you were gonna get the logs out.
There is more demand than there is supply.
Everybody is doing everything they can to run full out,
and that's true almost worldwide.
This timber is virgin timber, and it was quite old.
I've had an interesting life...
um, to say the least.
I went through a celebrity part of my life
where I was doing nothing but being interviewed
and asked about being kidnapped.
I had no way of ascertaining their intent.
There's so many different reasons
why we do need old trees.
They sequester carbon.
They create a habitat that younger trees cannot.
And I just find that there's such a unique beauty with age
that I really appreciate.
Yeah. When I look at my skin,
I kind of try to feel that way, too.
I-I'm trying to be happy with that as well.
I got excited when I found this article
in the newspaper from 2012.
A kind of cryptic description
of where the largest remaining Joshua tree was.
Uh-oh.
Wow, car just died.
They don't want the location known.
So, I figured if I could drive
up and down these paths to scope the area.
One by one, they've just gone,
and this is the last largest tree.
Maybe I can kind of look right through here.
By the time I get there, you know,
the excitement is palpable.
This is looking promising up ahead.
Well, there are tire tracks,
and maybe down this way-- Oh, yeah, look at this!
Unbelievable.
I think right here!
Okay.
It's different looking through that glass, isn't it?
Mm...
How lucky we are that we have
such a completely barren landscape.
All these small little nuances
go into a tree portrait.
So I think we should probably take an exposure.
I've got 10, uh, shots loaded.
Not like with a digital.
The sun sets again in the desert.
Okay, that's it. We're done.
Don't trip on the ivy!
Woo-hoo!
Oh, my gosh.
Come here. You okay, babe?
Hey. I'm sorry, babe.
That was fun while it lasted, though.
At least the tree's gonna live.
Hi, this is Ally with the city of Portland
Urban Forestry returning your call.
I understand you had a tree that fell into your yard.
The responsibility for trees in the right of way
would fall to you as the property owner.
And if you have further questions,
email trees@portlandoregon. gov. Thank you.
- Watch out-- - Oh, we are?
Yeah. Move away, maybe?
Oof!
Okay!
It's coming, it's coming!
It didn't break as much as I thought it would.
We can take it home.
Wait.
There's plenty more where this came from!
Where do I have to walk it to?
When I was growing up,
my father felt like a giant to me.
He was very tall,
and I was constantly looking up at him.
But he was also my dad.
And now, he's about to die.
I think my children felt Papa would live forever.
When I look out at this forest surrounding my house,
I...
I just think about decay.
I think about my dad.
The doctors told me
that Alzheimer's is really just
all these tangled-up neurons in the brain.
He can't remember anymore that he was a photographer.
He's the one who taught me to make movies.
He can't remember that he was a teacher,
an inventor.
You know, they say when you have this disease
that the memories you hold on to the longest
are the first-formed memories.
He knew my mom since he was a little boy.
And so, I believe my mom will be my dad's last memory.
When I look out at the trees in my backyard,
I think about the loss that I know is coming.
There's no difference between a big tree and a small tree.
They both have roots. They both have leaves.
They both need water. They both need sun.
Bonsai literally means "tree in tray."
"Bon" means tray, "sai" means tree.
And the kanji symbols together make the term bonsai.
These trees look this way
because they're not living in the Hilton of the landscape.
For all of the attention that everybody puts into
the wiring and the bending
and the pruning and the styling,
the place that matters for bonsai
is the core of the root mass.
And when you confine it, that bonsai container
is the last place that a root wants to grow.
Imagine starving your entire life.
That's why they're so small.
Each time I choose to touch a tree
when I fall out of love with it,
I work it until I'm back in love.
And then I let it do what it's gonna do
until I fall out of love again.
So it's like a constant breakup-make-out-session kinda.
You know, back and forth.
'Cause at some point,
this kind of softness is what I want,
but it's not there yet.
We still have more time. Gotta work a little harder.
My life since I was young
has been dedicated to this thing
that I didn't really understand
why I was compelled to be a part of it.
You know, like I still-- People say,
"Well, were your parents into gardening or...?"
There was no association whatsoever at all
to anything related to bonsai
ever in my life prior to that moment.
It just happened.
It was immaculate conception, and I thought, "That's cool.
I'm gonna do that."
And not only am I gonna do it, like, go buy one,
and water it and see if I can, you know, keep it alive,
I'm gonna do it for the rest of my life.
Alright, we're on the rooftop
of the workshop, and, uh,
here's a look at my world.
I was 21 when I went to Japan.
I told him I wanted to study with him,
and he said, "Well, it's gonna be difficult
for a foreigner to come over here and study with me."
So, um, I ended up writing him a letter
every month for about two years,
asking him if I could study with him.
So I wrote him 23 letters.
He wrote me back. The gist is, "You can come,
but don't plan on staying. Stop writing letters."
That was the gist.
To be an apprentice, people have this romantic idea.
You know, they think about the Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi
and, like, "wax on, wax off," and he's gonna be strict,
but really, he likes you.
You know, that's not what it's like.
At least it's not what it's like for Mr. Kimura.
Think only tree.
During that first meeting, he made one statement.
"Apprentices are like dogs.
"It doesn't matter where you eat,
"or where you sleep,
"or whether you get kicked or not.
It's just a matter of whether you show up the next day."
Yeah, I'm here every day. We don't get--
We get maybe one day off a month, maybe two.
So... I-I don't really have any place to go.
Trees, trees, everywhere.
It was brutal.
The first three months,
he was trying to get me to quit the entire time.
It was just a three-month hazing.
It sucked. It was terrible.
So much of my apprenticeship,
getting really aggressively reprimanded
for things that I never did.
Not many people are willing to be that nasty.
For him, there's this antiquated notion
of how you build a stronger person,
a stronger heart, a-a more durable man.
But he did cultivate greatness.
Probably, it's the best tree I've ever seen in my life.
For six years, the dialogue about me was,
"A gaijin will never understand bonsai.
"It's impossible.
You don't have it. This is a Japanese art form."
Clients of Mr. Kimura would request
I not be able to work on their trees.
But with Mr. Kimura, it mattered to me
because he was my master.
I sweat, I bled, I cried.
I went through a lot with that guy.
And towards the end of my apprenticeship,
I had become accepted.
I was a part of the family.
I was doing all of the work in the garden.
When I went back three months later,
I was a foreigner again.
And that really broke my heart.
You asked a question. I probably didn't answer.
Did you ever see trees as art?
I wouldn't say so. No.
You're thinking about bonsai?
I don't know how many individuals
are interested in bonsai,
but I got there accidentally.
It's a big part of Weyerhaeuser history.
What we eventually did do
turned out to be pretty significant.
Time may be running out.
Two bonsai trees stolen from a museum in Federal Way...
The thieves got in by kicking in a gate
up the road here at the Pacific Bonsai Museum.
Once inside, they stole two trees
worth thousands of dollars.
Assistant curator Scarlet Gore
walked onto the grounds to find the display cases empty.
We're on the east entrance
of Weyerhaeuser Company's headquarters campus.
You go around the campus and the museum,
we're amongst all these trees, kinda hidden.
These trees are like my children.
They took somethin' from me, personally.
I got the phone call from our monitoring service.
Got here as fast as I could.
I rounded the corner,
and that's when I saw that the black pine was taken.
reporter 1: The tree you don't see here,
the biggest gut punch of this theft.
You may see branches, but the man who grew this
created beauty as an ugly history played out.
Museum officials say they just want the trees back.
They're asking anyone with any information about them
to either return them or contact the museum.
reporter 2: As of today, there are no leads on the whereabouts
of the two trees, which could die within days
without the meticulous care they're used to.
"Hello. I just saw an article
"that a bonsai tree was stolen.
"The bonsai tree was grown by my grandfather,
"Juzaburo Furuzawa, whom I am named after.
"My family had no idea this tree existed.
"Thank you for taking care of this tree.
Matthew Furuzawa."
My father was a great bonsai master.
Before the war, the Furuzawa brothers,
the three brothers, they owned a nursery
in Berkeley on San Pablo Avenue.
So we all lived together.
I think that's me.
Little me.
Once, uh, the war broke out,
then they had to give all that up.
You could only take to camp what you could carry.
And so, my parents had a garage sale out in front.
The people that were coming knew that they were going to camp,
and they had to get rid of this stuff,
and so, they were trying to make the price
lower and lower.
And that's the only time my mother was angry.
She had these beautiful Japanese dishes and stuff
that she was going to sell, and the people would come,
and they would try to get it cheaper and cheaper,
and she got so angry, she just broke them.
It's called "Internment Camp,"
but it was really a concentration camp.
They were sent to Tulelake, which became famous
because of all the dissent that went on there.
They were deemed troublemakers.
He probably had the seeds stored away
somewhere in his suitcase.
The seeds came from Japan.
And he started to grow them in camp,
in a tin can, probably a soup can.
You have to remember that, before the war,
my parents had a nursery.
To go from that
to where there's nothing,
it was not a very pretty picture up there.
But one of the seeds took.
I think that bonsai, for him,
you know, was probably therapeutic.
He's in camp, but when he's, you know, tending to his tree,
maybe it takes him away.
For a few hours, he can have his mind take him elsewhere.
If I can, you know, maybe bring life to this tree
and then have hope, maybe one day, we'll get out.
We all need that sometimes, just to get away from,
you know, the world and all the craziness
and just, you know, be grateful
for the, the little things that we have.
It was a really hard life.
All of them. Everybody who went to camp,
I give them a lot of credit.
If you look at those little bonsai plants,
you get pleasure from just seeing it.
But it's more than that.
They endured.
We came back, and they had everything taken away from them.
They lost their businesses and everything.
They had to start from scratch.
So my father and his two brothers,
they all became gardeners.
He worked six days a week.
When he would come back from gardening
in the evening, at twilight,
you could find him sometimes just sitting in the backyard,
just looking at his trees.
After his death,
the plants were just too much for my mother to take care of.
And so, we decided that we would sell the plants.
I mean, the museum,
I didn't know anything about it.
I would have never known, unless,
of all things, unless it was stolen.
I never had any confusion that I wasn't Japanese.
But I recognize that that was not my place.
That that was not my place.
To Mr. Kimura treating me like a foreigner again,
after having gone through what I went through
over six years with him and that community of people,
best thing that could have happened to me?
Best thing that could have happened to me.
I built this place
in a state of total defiance.
Because I recognized I'm not like them.
I'm never gonna be like them.
And, in fact, I need to go find my own way.
- camera operator: Rolling. - What's going on, everybody?
I wish, I do wish
that I was in house tonight,
but Super Tuesday from afar...
If we're talking deciduous,
we're probably at the tail end of that leaf color change,
leaves shriveling up...
I couldn't do things the Japanese way.
There wasn't an American way.
I could separate this piece...
And that became the goal,
was developing an identity, not just for me,
but an identity for this art form in the United States
that deviated from the Japanese model.
Up next is Stephan.
Stephan says, "Hi. I'm in Zurich, Switzerland."
He has a design and technique question today.
This is where we would wedge cut the underside of this
to generate that next flush of foliar mass--
- Hey, bud. - Dad, there's a hazard sign on my computer.
- A hazard sign? - Yeah.
Okay. Okay. Hey, T? This is the last time
that I'm gonna be able to help you out, bud.
T? Taft?
- Yeah? - You good?
- Mm-hmm. - Okay.
So, my son and I live around here.
It's pretty rural and secluded.
Recently, we became aware
that a lot of the property up here is Weyerhaeuser.
Till they put up the signs, I really had no idea.
I had no idea at all.
This sign just popped up,
I don't know, maybe six months ago.
It's such a massive landowner in the Pacific Northwest.
It's always weird when you think that you're in
a rural, sort of isolated farming community,
and then you realize that Big Corporation
has sort of a stronghold on the land around you.
It-It's actually, I would say,
a little unsettling, uh, to be totally honest.
Coming back from Japan, I worked at
the Weyerhaeuser Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection a lot.
And through the relationship I had with
the Weyerhaeuser collection,
I learned more about the expansive empire
that Weyerhaeuser had created through timber.
He had a shipping line for boats,
he had freight lines within North America
to transport the logs, he had mills.
They were in control of literally every piece of it.
There was this tension in seeing
this bonsai collection at a corporation
that was clear cutting
a tremendous amount of forest.
Our family has been all wrapped up in trees
in all different forms, back to my great-grandfather.
And all the way down to me, personally.
radio host 1: George Weyerhaeuser was snatched
off the streets of Tacoma
- in 1935. - radio host 2: In the 1930s?
- radio host 1: In the 1930s. - radio host 2: Wow.
radio host 1: It had turned out that his grandfather's obituary
caught the attention of three people.
And they had the idea to have him kidnapped.
No! No! No! Ah! No!
What you don't know when you're kidnapped
is you don't know the end.
You don't necessarily wanna know the end.
newsreel reporter: Vicious kidnapping.
George Philip Weyerhaeuser, 9 years old,
disappears in Tacoma, Washington.
His mother, grief-stricken,
and his father, multimillionaire-lumberman,
are pushing the search.
The help of every citizen is needed.
If you see a boy of this description,
tell your police or the Department of Justice
at Washington DC.
I was trying to think. You know, what am I gonna do?
Then, they took me out in the woods and left me,
chained, in a hole in the ground.
In the end, I was by myself.
Remote. Left alone.
newsreel reporter: Home again.
Tacoma's 9-year-old George Weyerhaeuser,
released by kidnappers after eight days,
aids the hunt for his captors.
The Weyerhaeuser home.
Here, the frantic parents waited
after paying $200,000 to the bandits.
The farmhouse to which the boy walked six miles
and told his story of capture,
imprisonment in chains,
and of riding about boxed in an auto trunk.
The boy's safety brings cheer
to thousands of other anxious parents
as the manhunt goes on.
I think I learned being camera-shy
as a 9-year-old.
There I was, in our backyard full of reporters
and newspaper people and curiosity-seekers.
I wouldn't know that that was very entertaining for me,
but, uh, I couldn't get rid of it.
Timber.
It's always been a big thing in my life.
And, uh, I don't know whether it didn't lead
to my kidnapping, too.
Probably did.
Battle to the death!
Basically, my dad,
he has all these bonsais to keep him company.
This one, this one's a good battleground
'cause it has like big distance and lots of trees.
This would be a good climbing ground.
Like, see who's the fastest.
But it's not a battleground. No sir-ee-do.
Hold on, we gotta find my tree.
Stay out here for a second. Dad, where's my tree?
- Huh? - Where's my tree?
I know right where it is.
I couldn't see.
This is my tree!
I got it from when it was like a tiny baby.
I pruned it, I wired it.
I made it like a boxer to scare the bugs away.
It's basically mine, so yeah...
Let's wrap this up.
People say, "Is there a tree that you would take
if you could only take one tree?"
This is a tree that I don't fall out of love with.
This is Baker.
Baker and I have a very long history together.
This is the first Rocky Mountain Juniper
that I ever did any work on.
I think this little section right here
is just... incredible.
It's like a confluence of currents.
The dead and the live and where they're all twisting
and moving and rotating around each other.
Mesmerizing.
It's like you know what these trees really look like
- with their clothes off. - Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I know what they look like naked.
Well, because I've been so intimate with them.
Uh...
Yeah. I've been super intimate with them.
I mean... Boy, with Baker.
It's had roots grafted to it.
It's had roots ripped off of it.
It's had all of its root system bent
and highly manipulated.
My technique was, like, super raw.
This tree has really--
It's really been through a lot. Yeah.
This tree really birthed the more wild aesthetic
and spirit of my work.
This little hiccup right here-- shhp--
where the live vein, and you see the wood
and everything just sort of move through
that portion of the tree is fantastic.
I saw this tree right after it had been collected.
Um, and it was like love at first sight.
What sayeth the woman
who lies in green pastures that are not her own?
What songs does she sing?
What sound do her fingers make
as she tends the garden of some other dream?
What sayeth the woman who lies in green pastures
that are not her own?
This was the ship.
My brothers and I would pretend that this was a ship,
and one of us would come out here,
and we'd hide a stuffed animal and then we had to--
The driveway was the Piranha river.
So we had to take the ship and cross the Piranha river,
and one of us would have to find the stuffed animal.
It was kinda fun.
It's been 18 years.
But, even when I'm here now,
I can see what's missing.
So if I say "nature,"
what comes to mind?
Who comes to mind?
If I say "nature,"
do you come to mind?
If I answer that question, for a really long time,
I did not come to mind.
One of the drivers behind all the work I do is,
you know, where do I belong?
I grew up in Mamaroneck, New York.
And my father took this job.
It was a very wealthy family
that owned this 12-acre estate
right outside of New York City,
and they needed full-time caretakers.
This was 1958, so if you are a caretaker for an estate,
you're gonna live on it.
It had a-a pond. There was a swimming pool.
There was a huge, beautiful house,
which is where the owners would live
when they were there.
They didn't live there full-time.
And then,
there was a lovely gardener's cottage on the estate,
which is the one my parents moved into.
We had run of this place.
I always say it was like our own park.
That property was home.
I knew we didn't own it,
which ultimately meant we had no control over it.
It was a complicated relationship.
I know that the owner,
she had my father by her bedside when she died.
That's what she wanted. She relied on him for so much.
They-They had a relationship, for better or for worse,
you know, as people.
His domain was that 12 acres.
He took pride in that.
He poured into that, all of the freedom,
all the ability to decide that he didn't have in the world.
So they were on that land for almost 50 years.
My father bought my mother this cherry blossom tree.
He planted it where they could see it
from the window every day. It was right there.
Having their picture taken in front of the tree,
like this was the family tree,
indicative of their own relationship.
The roots of that tree represent me,
my brothers...
...our time as a family on that property.
The last picture of my parents in front of that cherry tree,
as I understand it, it's the new owner
who took that picture of them on the day they left,
in front of that tree.
About five years after they moved,
they received a copy of a letter,
and it was from the Westchester Land Trust.
They found out that a conservation easement
had now been placed on this piece of land,
and that means, in perpetuity, nothing can be changed.
"The Westchester Land Trust thanks the new owner
for his conservation-mindedness."
Now, he'd been on the land five, six years.
What struck me was that there was nothing in the letter
thanking my parents,
who had cared for that land for nearly 50 years.
And just like that, they were gone.
When I-- The letter,
that felt like a slap.
I sent them a picture. I said,
"Here's where the cherry tree is
"next to the house I grew up in.
Can you go and make sure it's still there?"
But they sent the picture of where the tree used to be,
and there was nothing.
It was like my mind was working in so many different levels
of just being devastated, of being angry,
of being... surprised.
It's personal!
How do I say a thing that's personal
and try to see everybody else's point of view
and not be mad? 'Cause the tree is gone!
And how is a tree gone when it should've been protected
like everything else on that property?!
Why wasn't it protected?! And nobody knew!
And what I realized was
that the people at Westchester Land Trust
didn't know the story!
The new owners didn't know the story!
They just didn't know!
And why didn't they know the story
of people who cared for that land for 50 years?!
How do you not know the story?! How do we not know the story?!
And that's-that's the place where I show up, going,
"How do we not know the story?"
Somebody cut the tree.
This is the stuff that always happens.
Somebody always cuts the tree.
Because it's not only history about trees!
It is a history about us
and who we are in relationship to those trees!
The people tending to it,
every single day,
who usually have the least amount of power
in deciding what is important.
But they are the ones who are mostly there all the time,
and often are answerable to it!
Who are you gonna ask something about that land,
the people who own it?
Or the people who worked it?
Oh, I couldn't have become a successful tree-planter
if I wasn't an optimist.
And so, I'm an optimist.
This wood is some of the best wood in the world.
There's trees over a thousand years old here.
These trees are-are beautiful timber
and get very high value in the marketplace.
I like an opportunity to plant, and I come to a block like this,
and I go, "Well, we'll plant it."
I realized quite deeply,
why I plant trees so continuously without stopping,
that is, year after year.
Tree planting is a positive-feeling act.
In early April each year,
tree-planting crews assemble in Vancouver.
Dirk Brinkman, the contractor on this crew,
hears from the logging company
that the snow has almost melted
from the Nass River Valley, and starts the shopping.
He tears about town,
buying everything from stovepipe, kerosene,
and a crew cab pickup truck,
to pounds of nuts, honey, cheese, and brown rice.
The crew load the crummies
with four tons of food and gear.
Still working north,
they're a thousand miles from Vancouver now,
leaving the pavement and electricity
and the noises of civilization
for the quiet of the Nass Valley,
and the sounds of logging.
It was all clearcut on both sides of the road.
And now, it's mature forests on both sides of the road,
or maturing forests on both sides of the road.
And we were the ones who planted it all.
I've walked into stands we planted 43 years ago,
and I could not touch my fingers, on the--
Wrapping my arms around the tree,
I could just barely not. Amazing growth.
And-And that's tree after tree after tree.
And, um...
Of course, they've logged it.
You've been the president of this company since 1966 I think.
And yet, you don't get delivered to the office door
in a long, black limousine.
Uh, you fly coach.
Where does that come from?
I think it comes, uh...
from the way I, uh, grew up.
And I guess mine was, uh...
uh, maybe amplified by being kidnapped
and being so, uh...
in the limelight.
I didn't ever feel that I wanted
to prove that I was important.
And I don't want this company to be populated with people
that are interested in appearances.
Uh...
- That's-- Mm-hmm. - So I react negatively.
So you're working with a tough nut.
I've been in front of the cameras for 90 years.
speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen.
In the interest of
an even more convivial dinner than usual,
this evening's occasion to honor,
once again, by the Newcomen Society,
Weyerhaeuser Company.
speaker 2: It gives me great pleasure to introduce
George R. Weyerhaeuser,
President and Chief Executive Officer
of the Weyerhaeuser Company. George.
Forests of North America
have been part of a passing parade,
and have played a formative role in our society
right from the very beginning.
Through most of our history,
the forest product industry's been a nomadic one.
And for the first 300 years of the American experience,
it's also been an extractive one.
It is an industry that, through history,
has been a key part of the US frontier
and has been led by rugged individualists.
Timber was abundant,
and it was a truism that a pioneer hates a tree.
In retrospect, some have identified these men
as rapers of the wilderness.
As men who should've been restrained.
The charge is unfair.
They acted in response to public need and public policy
as it was then.
Not as it is now.
By the turn of the century,
the era of cut-and-run was ending.
In 1966,
the company launched a campaign under the slogan,
"Timber is a crop."
Nobody really believed it.
It happened to be true.
High-yield forestry
is a shift away from the use of trees grown by nature,
towards trees selected for their genetic characteristics
and managed intensively by man.
Those who plant trees
give daily evidence of their faith in the future...
and in America. Thank you.
This is a fir.
And that's a fir.
And, you know, that's a 55-year-old tree.
This was called a 55-year-old plantation.
I was here when it was logged,
and in 40 years, it'll be logged again.
Well, in this way, I'm actually 76,
so I've outgrown this stand.
I'm certainly still of the school that
if you cut it, you've gotta plant it.
Reforestation is motherhood.
Do it because we have to do it,
not worry about whether we can afford to do it.
Today, Brinkman is 42 years old,
with shorter hair, a computer,
and $8 million worth of work this season.
Planting 37.5 million trees
in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario,
Brinkman and Associates
is now the largest single contract
tree-planting operation in Canada.
It's more challenging,
but I wouldn't say it's as much fresh clean fun for me.
Not like it used to be in the bush.
The reality is the tree market
is more or less of a commodity market.
I know I have moral complicity,
like everyone that enjoys
the value and benefits of wood.
I am part of that whole human experience where we use wood
and we draw it out of these forests.
I've planted 960,000 trees.
The company celebrated
its 1.5 billionth tree.
Has any other company
planted as many trees as you guys?
Well, Weyerhaeuser.
I think Weyerhaeuser celebrated
their two-billionth tree some years ago.
Weyerhaeuser started about eight generations ago.
Oh, eight generations ago?
Well, how many generations have I been working?
Two at least.
I've got children. I've got grandchildren.
When you reach my age, that cycle of life
and the tree's cycle of life seem very vulnerable.
Yes, the tree is vulnerable,
and it depends on the planter finding the right spot
and...
wishing it the best as he moves on.
Which one has poison ivy?!
There's no poison ivy back here.
There's English ivy. That's what all this green stuff is.
Okay, up.
It's ripping the bark off.
Here and here...
and all the way up here.
My grandpa,
he started developing Alzheimer's when he was 81.
It's kind of like the tree is Papa's brain,
and the vines on the tree is the vines in his brain.
It's just like...
there's a war.
I feel like lately, I'm having trouble
seeing things as they really are.
I'm seeing my dad every day
and he looks like a shell of who he used to be.
I just look at these vines all around me.
I'm obsessed with the tree being strangled to death.
Okay.
Alright.
You're looking at a cleaned-up version
of a total nightmare.
She showed up and parked down below the workshop.
She came up to the top of the property,
and... destroyed the trees.
She entered...
by breaking down the front door.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what you make of that.
Yep.
This is the most disturbing room to me.
This is where the knife was, right there.
But I understand her hatred towards me.
I don't understand why she would do this.
The video footage that we have shows her in here,
frantically moving back and forth,
breaking things, destroying things.
Uh, and when she leaves, she's naked.
I actually haven't watched the footage,
and I don't plan to.
I can wipe the blood away,
fix the drywall, find a new door.
I mean, the damage inside is all fixable.
The damage outside is...
I don't know.
It felt like destroying the trees was her trying to, like,
take a dagger to my heart kind of a thing.
Like, that was the jugular move.
She walked down here and ripped that piece off.
Just as like a-a final "fuck you," I guess.
I don't know.
It would be like cutting somebody's leg off,
what she did to the trees,
dismember them for the rest of their lives.
Eighty years of growth in that piece right there.
So you just don't get it back.
But the one that really--
the one that really sucked...
Baker.
It's just a matter of time now.
It was like that.
And it flipped over
and landed right on the top of the tree and...
cr-- uh, crushed half of it. So, um...
You know, Baker and I go back like...
to my time in Japan.
Very early in my apprenticeship in Japan,
I acquired Baker.
And it waited for me, and I came back from Japan.
I tried to repot Baker the first time
into a bonsai container.
And it had all kinds of problems,
and it was very challenging, and it almost died.
But it didn't die.
And so then, I grafted roots onto Baker
to make the next repotting easier.
And I thought that the root-grafts had taken.
And I cut the native root system off,
and I found out that very few of the root-grafts had taken.
And it almost died. But it didn't die.
So, this fucking tree has been through, like,
every, you know, painful...
moment of growth in my professional career.
And it's the one tree that, like, I just look at every day,
and it's like, you know, "You and me.
We're the only ones that know what this took to make."
You know, like, "You've been firsthand in it
from the beginning, in the fight."
So for that tree...
for that tree to get, uh--
that was the one.
I don't care about my house, uh, at all,
but I-- but I cared about that, so... yeah.
And unfortunately, that's the one that's probably gonna die.
He landed there, so...
My earliest memories
are of being outdoors.
From the moment I'd wake up in the morning,
I wouldn't be back inside
until I was called in when it got dark.
Everything I needed was outside.
It was wildly exciting.
And then, of course, getting older,
I kind of fell away from that.
So, this project,
to me, was kind of a way
to reconnect my relationship
with the natural world.
The first trees I photographed
almost 20 years ago.
At the beginning, I was just drawn to their strength,
and their power, and their size.
Now, I see this fragility that I never saw.
This preciousness about them.
Some species only grow in certain parts of the world.
A lot of them are really quite hard to get to.
Say, for example, the dragon's blood trees in Yemen
or quiver trees in Namibia.
These baobabs in Madagascar.
A strangler fig in Cambodia.
Bristlecone pine, California.
I make it a quest to be able to share these trees
with other people that wouldn't be able to go.
When I was in Madagascar this last trip...
...I went back to see this tree.
It's just such a fabulous tree.
And it is no longer there.
It's just one of the...
the large baobabs that's died.
This was the first warning bell,
the death of this tree,
because those countries are becoming warmer,
and they have less rain.
But now,
when I've seen so many that have fallen,
now, I am very aware of how fragile they are.
I was thinking there would be nothing.
But there's a stump.
Which, I have to tell you, I actually don't think--
know that I want the stump to be moved.
I just, uh...
I'm wondering if we-- Um,
Brendan! Can we-- Do we--
Can we let-let that stump stay there?
Absolutely.
Yes. That was a happy thing. That's good.
It makes me happy to know that this is here.
All the rings makes me think about what secrets the tree has.
Yeah.
Um... yeah.
That tree was about my parents.
It wasn't about the owner.
It wasn't even about the land.
That tree symbolizes their presence
and how we privilege what's in the book in the library.
This is the history.
And how many people are not in there, right?
Which doesn't mean they don't exist,
which doesn't mean it isn't true,
um, and how we all lose.
We all lose when that happens.
Some of us don't feel it too much.
And the rest of us, it's like an open wound,
all the time.
I lost more trees than I've lost in 11 years.
When a tree dies that I've actually...
had my hands on,
I don't...
I don't really feel good, like,
surrounding myself with that tree.
A lot of times, I will autopsy the tree
and then I try to move on.
But I don't typically keep them around to look at them.
Do you have a name for this part of the garden?
No... nope.
No, I hope I never have one.
Okay.
This is the last one that died from the, uh...
When the trees were vandalized,
it was like losing a big piece of my soul.
To destroy this living organism
that couldn't contribute an ill piece of will in any way
and was completely defenseless.
It's just, um, what's so disturbing about...
these sort of inevitable forces that keep moving forward.
It was really... It was a bummer.
This is the end of
a 200 or 300-year
narrative arc for a few of these.
I had a pretty intimate relationship
with that dead tree, which is just so hard for,
I think, people to really understand. So...
reporter 1: The Pacific Bonsai Museum
says two stolen bonsai trees have been returned.
Security guards found the bonsai at 11:00 last night.
They are more than 70 years old.
They're worth thousands of dollars.
reporter 2: Security guards found them
sitting in the middle of the road,
leading to the museum.
No one has claimed responsibility for the theft.
I pulled in and immediately walked up to the trees,
and they were facing each other.
And it almost looked like they were bowing and saying,
"We are back home."
And it was-- Yeah, I'm gonna start crying again.
It was very emotional. Very emotional.
I was 9 years old.
The little trees, that really took ahold.
I don't have too many artistry tendencies, and, uh...
I think it took a certain amount of imagination
by me to build a headquarters.
We hired some very fine people
to work within the bonsai empire.
Some made a living by it.
Being a bonsai professional,
there's no doubt in my mind that
the Weyerhaeuser Collection,
which is now Pacific Bonsai Museum,
has been a centrifuge for bonsai culture here.
And right now, this is the epicenter of bonsai culture
in North America.
I think that the bonsai, in particular,
are valuable in their own right.
They're kinda unique.
They really are worthy of, uh, whatever it takes.
Because of the funding that Weyerhaeuser provided,
because collections purchase trees,
there was a push for bonsai to be an art form.
And that has informed a lot of us.
Did Weyerhaeuser open the door
for me to have a career as a bonsai professional?
Absolutely he did.
It looked like there was nothing here.
Wonder if that's that Weyerhaeuser.
Jordan.
- Whose tree is that, J? - My great grandfather.
- Yeah, great-grandpa. - That's your great-grandpa's!
You can go into the forest,
and you can feel, "Oh boy, this is really nice,"
and, "This is very peaceful" and everything.
If you look at bonsai, it's different.
You're looking at a single plant.
And it's telling you, "This is me."
That tree is my father's legacy. I mean, that's him.
Wanna touch the needles?
Touch the needle. Up there.
Right there. Be gentle.
I just remember having to water them all.
- Well then, you've watered that one a few times. - Oh yeah.
It must remember you.
- Whoa. Oh, you are! - Stand there. Oh.
Just barely!
- It's your great-grandpa's. - Yeah.
If you don't remember him,
you can at least remember the tree.
- It'll outlive all of us. - Yeah.
When an independent historian sits down,
not the company-paid historian,
10 or 15 years from now,
and writes the history of Weyerhaeuser,
what would you hope they would say about
the George Weyerhaeuser era?
Which is gonna be 25 years long here.
What would you like to be remembered for?
I'd like to be able to pass through
as large an element as I can of what I thought...
- this company was when I inherited it. - That's it.
And I think it was somethin' pretty tremendous.
If there's one thing I would cherish, um...
it's my word.
I... I--
You can absolutely count on me.
And if you can't, I'm the guy that's hurt.
What's your favorite tree on the property?
- My favorite tree? - Yeah.
Oh, I don't know.
There's some damn big ones.
I think you oughta get out your clippers
and work on your bonsai, Dad.
It's, uh... it's losing shape.
Yeah.
Beautiful little things. Yeah.
They look fine.
Nothing is forever.
I'd like to think it is.
Doesn't usually work that way.
But it may.
Some of the trees I've photographed
have been as much as 4,000 years old.
I wanted to use a process
that would reflect this kind of age
and this kind of aesthetic.
With platinum printing,
the metals are very fine
and they embed themselves into the paper.
The tree will be living within the fibers of the paper,
so they become one.
Platinum printing is the most archival process that there is,
and it could last for thousands of years.
I mean, it can live on forever on a piece of paper.
The tree is gone forever.
Will we remember it? Yes, of course. Fondly.
But, the tree is gone, and, for me,
that's, you know, just heartbreaking beyond words.
Every life form has but one goal.
The goal of an oak seed is to become a mature oak tree.
I feel that the way forward
is through beauty.
This was a good departure for me,
to go back to the beginning.
- Look at all this moisture. - It's moist on top.
Certainly a good place for a fir tree.
Now, there's a tree.
And we'll see how that grows.
Should we go to the tree? Do you wanna come with me?
Come on, let's go!
So we call this the Tree Graveyard.
One day, the tide rose up so high
that it was able to put that log there.
Go faster. Run, run, run.
This isn't the graveyard. This is the juniper.
This is the juniper!
It's the fake graveyard!
'Cause you can see why this tree is almost dead.
'Cause it split in half.
But it's still alive.
It's still living.
When it first split,
I could look inside the fresh split
and see how old it was.
- How old is it? - About 800 years old.
A lot of things have happened to-- in each person's life,
while this tree just grows here slowly.
Isn't that kind of amazing?
Do you know how many lifetimes this tree grew?
It's 10 times as old as I am.
Half of the tree's genome
and our genome is identical.
The story is the same.
When living things defy the impossible,
we quantify it as a will to live.
The big risk with Baker was that
the whole tree was gonna die.
From the greatest tragedies,
generally, something significant comes from it.
Maybe something's gonna happen here,
and the tree's gonna survive, and I'm gonna be like,
"How did that happen? How do I duplicate that?
How do I learn from that? How do I understand that?"
And then suddenly, you'll be like,
"Wow, I'm so glad this got pushed off the bench."
At this point, it's a little hard to talk like that,
but you never know. You never know.
It's happened a lot with this specific tree,
so maybe it's got more in it. I don't know. We'll see.
Let's be done talking about Baker.
Hm.
There is, uh, at each turn in the road,
there's a moment where
a cataclysmic "something" happens.
Cold, heat, fire, volcano, whatever.
And then, the tree could die,
or the tree can live.
But it's always gonna carry the scar of it.
So suddenly, you have this turn.
That one died, this one lived.
And then, there's another turn.
This trunk died,
this trunk receded, but it's still alive.
And it just builds on itself with time
and unpredictable and predictable events
to become this.
That's a story.
That's a-- That's a-a life well lived.
I want that.
I want that for myself.
I want that for the human race.
Hoo!
Okay, pull!
Okay. Okay, stop!
Oh, this one's so pretty.
♪ Once there were green fields ♪
♪ Kissed by the sun ♪
♪ Once, there were valleys ♪
♪ Where rivers used to run ♪
♪ Once, there were blue skies ♪
♪ With white clouds high above ♪
♪ Once, they were part of ♪
♪ An ever-lasting love ♪
♪ We were the lovers ♪
♪ Who strolled ♪
♪ Through green fields ♪
♪ Green fields are gone now ♪
♪ Parched by the sun ♪
♪ Gone from the valleys ♪
♪ Where rivers used to run ♪
♪ Gone with the cold wind ♪
♪ That swept into my heart ♪
♪ Gone with the lovers ♪
♪ Who let their dreams depart ♪
♪ Home to the green fields ♪
♪ And me ♪
♪ Once again ♪