Comprising a Life

Until I was forced to give it up and substitute it with writing haiku, I was consumed with a passion for growing bonsai. From my early teens forward, I had propagated, searched nurseries for and collected from the wild, plant material suitable for being trained into bonsai.

Majoring in Ornamental Horticulture and Landscape Architecture in college, I was drafted into the army following my third after losing my student deferment due to the introduction of the lottery system and sent to Vietnam.

Upon my return, I and a small number of interested folks founded The Greater New Orleans Bonsai Society and in that same year I launched my Horticultural Service Company through which as it turned out, I was able to use a lot of the same pruning techniques practiced in creating bonsai.

Under the expert guidance of four separate bonsai masters from areas in California, Pennsylvania and New York, my bonsai began to show promise and I was soon doing some teaching on my own; first domestically and ultimately internationally. These invitations to teach bonsai abroad were responsible for my visiting exciting places like Columbia South America and South Africa.

However as my Horticultural Services Company began to blossom, my bonsai lecture tours had be curtailed. Teaching bonsai was a lot of fun and provided me some extra income but my main income was still derived from Nicholas and Banting, my incorperated souly owned, Horticultural Services company.  

None the less my compulsion for travel continued and not only to far flung bonsai clubs but also to the formal gardens of Europe. But nothing in these other travels quite drew me like the images encountered in untamed tropical habitat, an interest no doubt developed during my tour in Vietnam.

This fascination with tropical habitat would ultimately lead me to visit various other types of jungles around the world, from the single canopy tangles on the flanks of Puerto Rico’s rain forests, to the cloud shrouded forest preserves of Costa Rica and Hawaii. However none of these jungles were quite able to duplicate the type of jungle I had “humped” through during my time in Vietnam.

None that is, until I had the opportunity to explore Ecuador and the upper Amazon basin. Here I finally found the type of jungle I had so grown to appreciate in Vietnam. The underlying knowledge that there were people in that same jungle trying to kill me (and very nearly did) only partially dampened the experience for me.(clink this link) http://www.vlbanting.com/wounded.htm

My biggest challenge since Vietnam and my other adventures has been a battle with brain cancer and its lasting affects. Fortunately it appears that I have beaten it, as it has been fifteen years now since my being diagnosed and given just one year to live. However I am still plagued with partial seizures that leave me paralysed on my right, mute and confused for hours at a time. And as a result of the last of a total of four separate brain surgeries, I am pretty much wheelchair-bound these days. But life is good and I have been very lucky to have gotten this far. For a fuller account of my brain cancer journey, go to the index under Surviving brain cancer  or click this link http://www.vlbanting.com/survivingbraincancer.htm.

Today, after having to sell my business and  my bonsai collection, I am living a quiet life writing haiku and working on this Web page.

Oodles of photographs accompany the rest of the topics on this site for your viewing pleasure and I still have many more pictures to load.

Vaughn Banting

Click on Link to Art of Bonsai article

http://www.artofbonsai.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=936