I closed Naka’s books, opened my laptop, and googled, “Ficus religiosa pruning tips.” I clicked on a video tutorial. “Hi there,” a friendly voice said. “Nigel Saunders, for KW Bonsai. Today we’re gonna tackle this Ficus religiosa.” Kneeling in the dappled shade of a backyard was an unassuming, middle-aged man. On a table behind him sat a yellow bottle of Miracle-Gro and the bonsai of my dreams. The little tree had a healthy canopy of heart-shaped leaves, which I instantly recognized, and a trunk as thick as a sausage.

Over the next forty minutes, Saunders walked me through choosing the “front” of the tree (the side you want to show); he demonstrated how to remove the tree from its pot, trim the roots, and replant it; and he confidently guided me through pruning leaves. The video was an amateur production, but that drew me in. In one moment, he picked up his camera and zoomed in on the tree, its branches and leaves going out of focus; in another, a white chicken casually walked through the shot. There was no script or clever effects, and there was no formal Japanese terminology (unlike some other pros, he didn’t call his tree’s root base nebari without explanation; he simply called it “the root base”). Saunders presented bonsai not as a lofty, inaccessible art form; it was just a man and his tree.

The Ficus religiosa video was one of the first that Saunders uploaded to his YouTube channel, which he launched in 2014. (“KW” stands for Kitchener–Waterloo, a region that’s a couple hours’ drive west of Toronto.) His channel is organized into dozens of playlists containing numerous videos for each tree, allowing followers to track their progress over years. And his casual approach to bonsai has been popular, gaining him more than 87,000 subscribers and over 13 million views.

There are other bonsai YouTubers, including Tennessee native Bjorn Bjorholm, who was once called “the Brad Pitt of Bonsai” by Architectural Digest, probably thanks to his wavy blond hair and angular jaw. But Bjorholm, who trained for six years under a bonsai master in Osaka, Japan, has a teaching style that felt far above me. “When designing a coniferous bonsai,” Bjorholm says in one clip, “there is a general process utilized to determine the tree’s front, angle, branch placement, line, flow, and directionality. This process is largely influenced by value judgments regarding composite design, and those value judgments are themselves influenced by the larger cultural context in which contemporary bonsai art exists in Japan.” I turned off the video. Saunders’s passionate one-man-with-a-handy-cam performance, in comparison, feels like watching a high-school science teacher who can’t hide his elation with electron transfer. His videos are even studded with unintentional Tao-esque proverbs, including “I can always grow a branch thicker, but you can’t make them thinner.”

For four years, I doted over my bonsai’s health, cautiously following Saunders’s regular Ficus religiosa updates, until my tree developed a full canopy. At first, every new leaf was a badge of honour, but soon, they represented a problem: Saunders’s trees were stout and proportional—they looked real. Mine, meanwhile, was spindly and, at nearly two feet from root base to tip, looked nothing close to natural. I worried that I’d performed the cardinal sin of growing bonsai: I had let my tiny tree get too big.

Paralyzed by fear that I would kill my bonsai—too worried to repot it or aggressively prune it—I realized that I needed help. So I picked up my tree, hailed a cab, and headed to the train station. It was time to meet my bonsai master.

On a breezy spring day, Saunders pushes open a gate at the side of his house and leads me into his solarium, where he keeps his tropical bonsai through the winter. With his frizzy grey hair and glasses, plus an outfit of khaki cargo shorts, a red fleece, and Crocs sandals, the fifty-six-year-old looks like some kind of modern wizard who traded his wand for a spade.

Saunders’s affinity for the miniature started when he was a kid and would spend hours on end constructing and painting model airplanes. “When a plastic or wooden model is completed,” he says, “there’s no more work to do to it. Bonsai trees are never finished—instead of collecting dust like a plastic model, they keep getting better as they get older.” He continued this fascination into adulthood, working at GM designing models of locomotives and, later, at General Dynamics, producing an eight-wheeled armoured Stryker vehicle that the US military sent to Iraq. He quit that job after seeing his work being used in a theatre of war and started a home-based computer-graphics company. His clients have included the Hamad International Airport in Doha and sets for the Calgary Stampede.

Bonsai, meanwhile, combined his skills at realizing scenes in miniature with his love of the outdoors. He never studied under a bonsai master (five years of apprenticing is required to be inducted into Japan’s exclusive Nippon Bonsai Association); Saunders simply planted, pruned, and grew. “I wouldn’t consider myself a professional bonsai artist or anything but a professional YouTuber now,” he says. After monetizing his channel and rebranding as the Bonsai Zone, he now earns around $1,200 every month from his videos—enough, with his savings, to retire. Saunders spends up to four hours every day responding to emails and comments from some of his thousands of followers. His life is now filled with bonsai. “Some people look at porn on the internet,” he says. “I look at trees.”

Bonsai are often supranatural representations of trees: exaggerated, near fantastical in form, and unnaturally dramatic in shape. To achieve these iconic forms, traditional artists bend branches and secure them in place with wire. Saunders, however, prefers a technique called “clip and grow”—where a tree is pruned, left for half a year to rebound fully, and then tamed once again. He argues that to force a tree into a stylized bonsai that looks cartoonish or otherworldly—“what you think the tree should look like, not what the tree thinks it should look like”—is to miss the most powerful opportunity of the art: to transport someone out of their bubble and into a pint-sized simulacrum of the wild.

Bonsai has long been an exclusive club for the knowledgeable and proficient, and not everyone reacts warmly to Saunders’s techniques. “Saunders [sic] videos are so misinformative both somewhat horticulturally and very much in technique that they’re dangerous to the practice of bonsai,” wrote one commenter online. Another called him the “Bob Ross of Bonsai,” referring to the host of The Joy of Painting, an art program from the 1980s that was geared toward amateurs. Others have called his trees “garbage” and “ugly and of inferior quality.” The comments are not exactly the most vitriolic trolling on the internet, but when Saunders lists off the insults that have been directed toward him—people calling him a “tree torturer” or proclaiming that one of his bonsai is just “a stick in a pot”—he seems to have taken them to heart.

This level of attention is also why Saunders prefers to keep the town where he lives private, out of concern for his more valuable bonsai. It’s a legitimate fear: through the spring of 2015, seventy-one-year-old Tak Yamaura, a bonsai master who sold trees out of his nursery in suburban Vancouver, was the target of a string of burglaries. On six occasions within one month, thieves broke into his compound and collectively made off with about $65,000 worth of Yamaura’s most prized trees.

As I follow Saunders into his backyard, I recognize the maple under which he filmed the first Ficus religiosa video. Saunders places my tree in his makeshift outdoor filming studio—a wood workbench behind which he hung a black piece of fabric—and steps back. I watch his smile, feeling like I just handed in a school project and can tell I’m about to get a “good effort” at best. “It’s not bad,” he says. He talks about “potential.” “It’s from a seed, that’s incredible,” he says, and I beam from the compliment. Many budding bonsai growers might assume that growing a little tree is no different than taking care of a hardy succulent. And clever shop owners lead people astray, hawking six-inch-tall juniper bonsai as perfectly adept at living in urban apartments with minimal care. But it’s a lie: while tropical trees, including my Ficus religiosa, can be happy on a sunny windowsill indoors, conifers—including cedars, pines, and junipers—are more reliant on natural fluctuations of temperature, sunlight, moisture, and humidity. Saunders says that he wants his videos to show all the steps in growing bonsai—which trees to select and how to care for them. “It’s the same amount of work as taking care of a cat or a dog,” Saunders says. “You don’t go on vacation without leaving water for your cat.”

Then the bonsai master steps forward. My tree is indeed big, Saunders says, which is fine if I have space. Some bonsai, known as imperial bonsai, are, in fact, large. A 1,000-year-old tree at the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum in Japan is more than five feet tall—though that height’s not exactly practical in my 350-square-foot apartment. Kneeling at his workbench, Saunders confirms that the issue with my tree is that it is completely out of proportion. He squints through his glasses, his eyes scanning up and down. “There is the opportunity here to start it over,” he says, chuckling. “If you want.” The importance in any bonsai, he tells me, is roots, trunk, and branches, in that order. People may focus on the canopy of leaves or the stylized branches, but Saunders says the most important feature is actually underground. I realize what I have to do.

Saunders hands me a pair of “bypass pruners,” named as if they were tools for open-heart surgery. My hand trembles with worry that this won’t be a new beginning but a tragic conclusion. You have to be brave in bonsai, Saunders says. He recites a bonsai mantra, often attributed to John Yoshio Naka: “Me chicken. You chicken. No bonsai.” I take the pruners and, in one snip, decapitate my tree. I nearly yell, “Timber!” as the leafy crown I’d spent four years growing falls away from its trunk. “Done! It’s bleeding,” Saunders says with a laugh, noting the milky liquid oozing from the cut. He quickly gets to work, shaking my tree out of its pot, washing it of its soil, and splaying its roots out on the table. I feel oddly exposed. After an hour, my tree is pruned, its roots trimmed, and it’s been replanted back in its pot. My beloved tree now resembles a sad, foot-tall stump. “It won’t look the greatest for a while,” Saunders says. In bonsai terms, though, I’m not sure how long “a while” will be.

“Abonsai tree is a lifelong project,” Saunders says. “It is a hobby you can practise right to the end.” The end is something he thinks about often. There is a point in any artistic field known as completion, when the sculptor puts down her chisel or the painter washes his brushes and they step back to gaze upon their finished work. But this moment does not exist for the bonsai artist. “The closest thing to coming to a finished bonsai is when you put it in a show,” Saunders says. “It’s temporarily as good as it’s going to get at that particular point in time.”

A properly cared for bonsai could live just as long as some of the oldest trees in the wild, such as the millennia-old bristlecone pines found in the mountains of California. It’s possible that bonsai could even live longer, shielded from the uncontrollable forces of nature that so often end a tree’s life. While bonsai etiquette suggests that a new owner must honour their predecessors’ style and ambition for a tree, Saunders says the vast majority of bonsai do not survive being passed down. In 1970, the caretaker of the emperor of Japan’s bonsai collection, Kyuzo Murata, sold one of his prized trees—an estimated 800-year-old gnarled and twisted juniper known as Fudo—to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, partly in an effort to protect it from the pollution in urban Japan. “I am not against progress,” Murata reportedly wrote in a letter to the BBG. “But trees do not understand it.” A year after Fudo was flown to the US, however, it died of unknown causes.

What will happen if Saunders’s trees outlive him? None of his children have shown much interest in the hobby yet. “I look at it and I see a seedling,” Saunders says, pointing to one of his newer trees in his backyard. “And bonsai gives you the ability to look into the future, what that tree’s going to do in two or three years, or five years or ten years….I am fifty-six this year, and there’s a timeline that you’re going to die. You kind of think, ‘What do you want to do with the last thirty—if you’re lucky, forty—years of your life?’”

The sun is setting when Saunders drops me back at the station, one short day in the long life of a bonsai over. I board the train car cradling my tree, which now looks like some weird product of logging. I’m also carrying a plastic grocery bag that reads, “Support a greener Ontario.” Inside is my severed leafy top—Saunders assured me that I can root the treetop in water to try to keep it alive. There is a future here too.

To be a bonsai artist, you must look ahead. You can’t think about what your tree looks like today or what it will look like next month; you have to think about what your bonsai will be a decade from now. I sacrificed years off my tree for the hope of a better future—one of mature and proportional growth.

When I reach my apartment, I place my stump on the sunny bay window. I wait, and I water. I do not worry. Two weeks later, a single heart-shaped leaf unfurls from the top.