ANN ARBOR, MI - Jack Sustic drives about an hour from his Swartz Creek home west of Flint to Ann Arbor and back twice a week to continue a passion he cultivated nearly four decades ago.
Sustic, 62, is the curator of bonsai trees at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum at the University of Michigan. He was stationed outside Seoul, South Korea with the U.S. Army from 1985-87 when he saw his first bonsai tree.
Before that, he probably couldn’t tell the difference between a tomato and a maple tree, he said, with a laugh. But the more he focused on the bonsai, the more it captured his imagination.
“That visit really planted the seed,” Sustic said.
His current stint as Matthaei’s bonsai boss comes after 20 years of curating the trees at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum in Washington, D.C., and about a decade of training before that. After South Korea, Sustic was stationed at Fort McClellan in Alabama, where he joined the Alabama Bonsai Society and trained at workshops with bonsai experts.
He loved fostering the growth of younger trees by pruning the leaves on branches that move in all directions, he said.
“Watching that maturation and development through more branching and more twigging and the bark starting to look older,” he said. “That’s what I enjoy to see.”
A dwarf umbrella tree bonsai on display in the Conservatory at Matthei Botanical Gardens, 1800 N. Dixboro Road in Ann Arbor on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023.Jacob Hamilton | MLive.com
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Sustic’s skill grew to the point where he interned for the national museum in Washington, D.C. in 1996 His knowledge of bonsai flourished even more under the tutelage of John Naka, considered America’s foremost bonsai cultivator.
“He was often referred to as the father of American bonsai, and I would learn from him at his home in Whitter, California outside Los Angeles or when he came to Washington,” Sustic said. “If everyone I learned about bonsai from was in a pie chart, he would be the largest slice of that pie.”
Sustic became the national museum’s curator in 2002 and retired in 2016 to return to his home in mid-Michigan.
His expertise was needed at Matthaei when its bonsai specialist Carmen Leskoviansky left for a three-year apprenticeship in Portland, Oregon. Sustic will curate and do daily maintenance for Matthaei’s collection until Leskoviansky returns, he said.
Sustic’s work, done part-time twice a week, varies by the season, he said. In the spring, it’s about replanting the trees. The summer involves a lot of pruning, checking the trees for diseases and a lot of watering.
“You need a soil that drains well,” Sustic said. “(The bonsai) don’t really like to have their feet wet, so to speak.”
Fall is about preparing the trees for storage in the winter, when they became dormant. That’s also a good time to check how they branch and if corrections are needed through pruning to position the branches “where we want them,” he said.
Sustic himself has a collection of more than 60 bonsai trees at home, including one he has cared for since 1990. Bonsai trees can live for 200 to 300 years.
Caring for trees for that amount of time builds a relationship with strong roots, Sustic said.
“I can just close my eyes and I can picture the branching habit in the style of the trees and almost every detail,” he said.
He shows his trees at international exhibitions. One won the 2005 World Bonsai Friendship Federation photo contest.
Sustic has some staff and interns who assist him as he maintains the Matthaei bonsai collection. Depending on the season, he has about a half dozen volunteers, he said.
Sustic looks to share the same love of bonsai with them that he found in South Korea nearly four decades ago.
“(Bonsai) invoke your imagination,” he said. “When you’re looking at the tree, you kind of lose yourself that moment or five minutes or whatever time you’re looking at the tree. That’s what they do to me.”
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