Our space

My first bonsai lived on the balcony of an ordinary apartment block. Since I had only a few trees, I didn’t need any special space for them. Over the years I worked on more and more trees, and within a few years the growing collection no longer fit on the balcony. The only place I could put them was the roof of my apartment building. Working there turned out to be convenient for me, because when I got home from work I didn’t have to go far or waste time on the road.

I worked on the roof for several years, but soon I could barely fit all my bonsai there. So when the nursery company (“Europlant Georgia”), located at the exhibition grounds on Tsereteli Avenue, offered to let me move in with them, I readily agreed.

The new space allowed me to grow my collection even further and take on new challenges. I felt at home there, and on top of that the nursery always had some young plant that caught my interest. So I no longer had to travel far to find material.

Even so, you couldn’t call my workplace an exhibition space. For the most part I didn’t even think about arranging the trees attractively, because I had neither the money nor the time for it. As a result, it was hard for visitors to properly take in most of the bonsai. (Some stood at the wrong height, trees hid one another, and so on.) Yet a bonsai should be displayed in a space of its own, so that its beauty can be fully appreciated.

My younger son took it upon himself to fix this. For almost a year we searched for a suitable space. Various companies and nurseries offered to host our collection on their premises. In the end, though, we preferred to set up a space independently, to our own taste.

In January 2021, close to our bonsai and again on the grounds of Expo Georgia, a greenhouse built in the Soviet era became available. The building looked more like the ruins of a greenhouse. We realized from the start that it would be hard to put it in order. We would have to do everything ourselves. We asked our friends what they thought of the greenhouse, and they too saw its potential as an exhibition space. That is how we decided to move there. In the future the building could also serve as a classroom for bonsai courses. That same winter we decided to rent the place and set about restoring it.

My children and their friends helped enormously with the renovation. Without their help it would have been impossible to create the exhibition space. Within six months we had given our greenhouse the look it has today. Our bonsai courses are also running successfully. The greenhouse has become both an exhibition space and a comfortable place to work.

I’m glad that most of our visitors like our space. There are still some details left to finish before the place can be considered fully complete, and we hope to get all of it done in the near future.