Iris Cohen wrote:

According to the school of Rabbi Yuji Yoshimura, what we call in English a tray
landscape is a bonkei. According to the school of Rabbi Toshio Kawamoto, a
more-or-less permanent arrangement of trees, rocks, and accessory plants is a
saikei (the word was coined about 30 years ago). We usually call these in
English a tray landscape.
A Chinese penjing is something else. We usually give that name to a
land-and-water arrangement in the style of Quing Quang Zao.
My understanding is that a bonkei is a temporary landscape made up of twigs,
unrooted cuttings, and herbaceous plants. Does anybody have any further
information or opinion on this? What do you call these in other European
languages?

Bonkei seems to mean a lot of things. When some of my club members
visited Japan and a japanese family, the father and son made a bonkei
(their words). This was almost like a painting, where different types of
sand was used to create a landscape on a tray.

I use the term saikei for a landscape with different types of trees,
plants and stones. According to Deborah Koreshoffs book, saikei was
invented by Toshio Kawamoto in way to use young plants while they
develope into bonsai. This was after WW II when lot of bonsai had been
destroyed. This was also a way to get the general public interested in
bonsai without having to invest in expensive mature specimens.

Henrik Gistvall, Uppsala, Sweden

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