On A Roll: Hugh Grant

Mount Kosciuszko, Australia

We sent bonsai artist Hugh Grant a disposable camera and gave him one simple instruction: capture the essence of a space that inspires you. What he sent back is nothing short of captivating. Dive into his world and see the stunning images that reflect his unique perspective.

Mirai: So where exactly are we?

Hugh Grant: So this is a little valley which is just underneath the highest point in the country, which is Mount Kosciuszko. This is basically the highest location in Australia, which isn't that high. It's just a bit over 2,200 meters or 6,600 feet. It's a really beautiful Alpine environment with mainly granite stone boulders sort of strewn everywhere from the time when it was a big glacier back in the day. So you see lots of erratic sort of glacier boulders all over and it's one of the rare places in the country where you can see Krummholz tree forms.

Mirai: And pardon my ignorance, but what's a Krummholz tree form?

Hugh Grant: It's a German word for a dwarfed tree. It's basically the kind of trees that people collect in America for bonsai. So dwarfed, compacted, usually growing at subalpine treeline.

Mirai: I see in this image we're starting to see that kind of that form that you're talking about.

Hugh Grant: This is the first in a series of images in which I tried to discover how to capture these trees best. What you're seeing here is partly dead and partly alive. In this case, a lot of them were actually dead, which is interesting because you get to see the structure.

The tree you're looking at here is a Podocarpus lawrencei or the Mountain plum pine. It's one of the few native conifers in Australia. It covers the same ecological niche as a juniper. They grow exactly like junipers in form, with a similar vascular system in appearance and function i. The key difference is their small needle-like leaves instead of scales. Otherwise, if you removed all the foliage, you wouldn't be able to tell if it was a juniper or a podocarpus.

Mirai: I feel like it's a beautiful example of the skeletal form that you were talking about.

Hugh Grant: Yeah, this photo is looking at a different variation, a younger form. These are really accessible to look at. You can see that singular line running across the stone, and then they splay out their branches. It almost looks like a line drawing of a tree or something.

Mirai: Because you are both a photographer and a bonsai artist, what were you looking for when you approached this project?

Hugh Grant: I think first and foremost when I'm out in the landscape trying to take photos, I look for composition. It’s not only “this is a cool tree or a cool thing,” because that doesn't actually translate in an image very well. I ask myself-does it have depth? Does it show the rest of the landscape around it? I’m trying to find that image that represents what I'm trying to show, but also not having to show everything in order to tell the story and let the image speak for itself.

I found that quite challenging in this landscape because when you're amongst these trees and landscapes, it's so easy, especially for me, to get excited. I can look at a bit of foliage hanging off the rock and a little bit of deadwood, and I think this looks really cool. But through the lens, it doesn't work. So then I'm on to the following location to see if I can translate something, which I focused on a lot.

Hugh Grant: Here you see a shattered giant granite boulder. You’re really seeing the effects of multiple environmental factors that go on in this location from being so high up. Often, the granite boulders will have ice or water that seeps into the cracks and then in a huge freeze it will actually crack the boulders open which then becomes the starting point for a lot of these podocarpus, as they sort of find that crack where it's a bit more protected for the roots, and probably warmer amongst the stone over the winter, to take hold.

Mirai: If I understand it correctly, it's a really cool full-circle moment—the water comes in, freezes, and supplies the cracks, providing the space for the trees to grow and providing shelter that protects them from freezing.

Hugh Grant: Yeah. Absolutely.

Hugh Grant: Here we have quite an old podocarpus. You can see it on the protected side of the boulder. It's sort of hiding out from the prevailing winds. But still accessing enough sunlight needs, as it is a conifer. You can see a few of them over on the left there too, almost like a mounding blanket over the stone. So this spot is really accessible to get a good shot with a bit of distance behind it. You’ve got this flow of movement from left to right. So I just thought it was a really beautiful image to show the form.

Hugh Grant: I think I found this interesting because the deadwood was just surrounded by foliage. It was hard to understand how the rest of the tree was interacting with that exposed part of the trunk. It almost felt like an oxymoron because how could you have this harsh piece of deadwood surrounded by all this lush foliage. I think it really epitomized the sort of the common theme you see amongst the species, which is a really degraded trunk but lush, healthy and happy foliage because of the way it clings to the protection of the stone so well.

Hugh Grant: This image is really cool, it almost looks like this huge boulder’s got grass growing in all the crevices and almost creeping around the top side. So that's actually the podocarpus. I took a picture of this one because I was running around and investigating every opening in foliage, looking under the hood of the rock and I'm pretty sure this is one tree. This is then in fact actually a very large giant ancient tree just slowly creeping all over the stone.

If you lifted this off the rock, you'd probably see a flat line drawing of a tree, as if a toddler drew a tree. That's probably what it looked like if you levered it up off the stone, but it's completely flattened and molded into the crevices of the stone.

Mirai: Would you style a bonsai form of this podocarpus in the same kind of manner we see in these photos?

Hugh Grant: Yeah, this is the question that comes up for me from studying these trees. When I see them, I try to see it as if I could excavate one of these from the landscape and reduce it to something usable. It would be just like a piece of juniper yamadori, right? But it begs the question, would styling a tree in that slightly more abstracted version of the material be the best choice, or would it be better to go more towards the form that you see it as here, laying on the stone with that lushness against the rock. This would be using not just the contrast of deadwood and foliage and live vein, like in a juniper sort of a dogmatic approach, but also the contrast of those elements with the stone. The stone is granite and ghostly white, and it feels like a piece of deadwood.

Hugh Grant: I guess it is more intriguing to me because, in Australia, there likely aren't any landscapes where you could legally collect this particular species of tree from an environment like this. I will never go through the process of finding one of these against a boulder, collecting it, and taking it home.

If I want to create one of these compositions, I would grow it from a small sapling myself. That root of creating the material leads me to contemplate putting it back in the environment because I never removed it from the environment. Instead, I'll grow the material and put it on a stone to try and make it look like the environment in which I've seen these trees growing. It's a different route to dealing with the material, and that inspires me to utilize that material in a different way than you would with an equivalent species, like a Rocky Mountain juniper or Sabina juniper. The access point to creating the work is different material-wise. This leads me to get back to the roots of how it grows in its environment.

Mirai: Other than the elevation, do you have a personal connection to this space?

Hugh Grant: I think I really like high elevation environments. I always get really giddy about them. It's such an unusual rare thing in Australia to be on a mountain. I really like this kind of environment, funnily enough. I really like the cleanliness of it, and the lack of complication through large trees everywhere. There's something quite simple about it. I find it ironic being quite a tree guy, right? I always feel quite at home when I come to a place like this. I find it quite simple and beautiful. Yeah.

Mirai: I have a friend that says everyone's either a tree or a rock person. And I noticed that there's a lot of rocks in this environment as well as trees. Would you classify yourself as a tree or a rock?

Hugh Grant: I'd say I'm a tree and a rock person.

Mirai: Not fair.

Hugh Grant: I guess if I have to choose a tree or a rock, tree. But when I was a kid I used to go on trips with my dad fossil hunting. We used to go up to the volcanic areas of Queensland and go hunting for geodes and rocks, looking for fossils and stuff. One time we went and instigated the possibility of becoming opal miners. So I’ve always been a bit of a rock guy. I guess that’s probably why I find this kind of interaction of tree and stone really fascinating because I do like both things quite a lot and they're very intertwined, very much so.