Dubai's bonsai master

When Robert MacNair bought his first bonsai in the 1980s, little did he know it would be the root of a life-long passion.

He purchased the delicate juniper for a few hundred pounds from a flower shop whose staff were mystified about how to care for it.

The Scottish resident sat the bonsai on a TV in a dark corner of his room.

“Within three months it frazzled up and died,” he says with a chuckle. "I killed my first tree."

A second bonsai, known as a beech forest, seemed to be heading for the same fate until one morning, when he was out having coffee, looked across at it and noticed something unusual had happened.

“I could see lots of little green dots,” he says. “It was new leaves.”

Several decades on, that plant is still thriving and Mr MacNair, 67, has become a bonsai master in Dubai, after moving to the emirate more than 15 years ago. He is a self-taught enthusiast, collector, teacher and vendor in the world of an ancient art.

It is a delicate process of watering, pruning, grafting and training using aluminium wire to guide the small branches to create the look of a miniature tree. It is done entirely by hand and isn’t a job for someone in a hurry.

When The National visited his Umm Suqeim villa one winter morning, quiet quickly descended. His home has become a bonsai garden with hundreds of the delicate trees, including miniature ghafs, dotted around the grounds. The busy city outside seems far away and here the peaceful world of bonsai reigns supreme.

“We go with Japanese rules,” says Mr MacNair, pruning a delicate bonsai. “But I don’t agree with all the Japanese styling. I’m more of a free-form styler.”

There isn’t anything about bonsai that Mr MacNair is unable to answer. He can give detailed explanations on the best potting mix (he sells it) to the top collectors in Japan, while delivering anecdotes about a colourful life that led him to leave Scotland at 19 and eschew a path in medicine to travel the world. Mr MacNair spent stints in Jersey working in the property renovation business in the 1980s; France in the 1990s and then Russia before landing in the UAE.

But the bonsai bug was always there. He recalls one of the ways to obtain information in the early days was by subscribing to Bonsai Today magazine, which was available only by mail order from the US. He even had a stall in a Bordeaux market selling trees. “It gets into you and stays,” he says.

By 2006, he had moved to Dubai to work in the property sector and founded his business, Bonsai Middle East, in 2011, to which he now dedicates all his time. Bonsai and Dubai may seem an unusual combination but he has clearly seen a gap in the market. When he launched his website in 2013, he said only two people visited a month but today it has 600,000 visitors. He puts the increased interest down to bonsai being a status symbol, general curiosity and the Covid-19 pandemic. "That was a bumper year," he says of 2020, when the outbreak occurred. "People wanted something of nature."

It is believed bonsai originated in China thousands of years ago and a variety of the art subsequently developed in Japan. The word bonsai literally means tray-planting. Bonsai trees, which can be several centimetres to about a metre in height, are grown in small containers and require expert care. They aim to mimic a larger landscape, can grow for hundreds of years and fetch high prices.

Mr MacNair sells only bonsais suited to the UAE climate. The most popular is carmona, with beautiful white flowers, along with the Chinese elm, Buddhist pine, golden dewdrop and premna. In the summer, trees need watering three times a day if kept outside but much less inside.

"People in the bonsai world call me the ‘king of the desert’," he says. "They are amazed I can do it here."

Other bonsais such as the red maple or cherry blossom require a winter season to survive. "You can't put it in fridge," he says with a chuckle.

Prices start at Dh490 ($133) but they can run into the hundreds of thousands of dirhams. He also imports bonsai versions of the UAE’s national tree, the ghaf, from Indonesia. He says the seeds are carried by migratory birds to Indonesia. "They are amazing looking trees."

About half are sold to order before they even arrive in the UAE. One sold shortly before Christmas for Dh250,000. From up to eight ghafs at one point, he now has only one left, with a Dh28,000 price tag, that is about 60 years old.

"People will take three or four," he says.

Traditionally, bonsais were often taken from the wild in what the Japanese call "yamadori", explains Mr MacNair. They could be young or stunted trees or growing in poor conditions on mountains or clifftops and collected by professional bonsai hunters.

“They would take it and say 'it is just like looking over there at that mountain and the trees'," he says. "They would make a landscape. They were little miniature works of art.”

Mr MacNair notes wild trees can often be the best as nature does "80 per cent of work". But rules and regulations surround this and he warns it is illegal in many places to take trees without securing private or government permission. You can't just dig up a tree, he says. Bonsais today are also grown from seeds or cuttings in nurseries, where Mr MacNair sources his, in a growing process that takes decades.

As he inspects the plants, watering some and pruning others, Mr MacNair explains it can take decades to go from seed to tree. “Nurseries in Japan plan hundreds of years in advance,” he says. And the cost is simply down to the amount of time and care they need.

“One nursery takes a tree for five or six years. Then it is on to a different nursery to refine it and give it shape and develop roots, which is vital. Nothing is immediate.”

He has also become something of an expert at rescue and recovery, with parts of his villa resembling a bonsai hospital ward. A miniature chainsaw allows him to nip off unwanted branches. And a selection of stainless-steel tools are laid across the work surfaces to allow for expert pruning and clipping.

“This had no leaves when it came in,” he says, pointing to one he has brought back from the brink and is now sprouting green shoots.

“We took it out of the pot, washed the roots and cut the dead ones. It was rotten inside so we scraped the rotten wood out and put lime sulphur in, which kills off any bugs and preserves the good wood.”

Mr MacNair says there is a worldwide shortage of good bonsais now, with Chinese buyers particularly active. “We still do it because people have known me for about 30 years,” he says. "It is big business. We sell a heck of lot of bonsai."

He also hosts buyers, experts and enthusiasts from across the world. Mr MacNair won’t reveal who his customers are but they come from all walks of life and all nationalities, with a few VIPs thrown in. He even holds classes and offers a holiday service where people can leave their bonsais when travelling.

Sitting in his garden with his coffee, surrounded by bonsai trees with birds chirping in the morning sun, Mr MacNair reflects on a life dedicated to bonsai.

“There is nothing mystical, to me, about it," he says. "But once you get bitten by the bonsai bug, it is with you for life.”