Barrington Bonsai brings together botany, patience and art

In a quiet backyard in the northwest Chicago suburb of Barrington, patience, art, and nature are coming together in the form of a bonsai greenhouse.

Ryan Rubel is the owner of Barrington Bonsai. He grows a specific species of bonsai called cork bark dwarf jades.

"Kind of the goal is to get people to learn about bonsai, and then also kind of get this species out there more," Rubel said.

It is warm and peaceful inside Rubel's custom greenhouse, where rows of perfectly sculptured miniature trees line the tables. Each has a story, a history, and a future.

Rubel tends to hundreds of bonsai year-round — shaping, trimming, and training them into living sculptures that in some cases take years to grow.

"These are super-resilient trees," Rubel said. "They are drought-tolerant, so if I go on vacation, I don't have to worry about watering them."

Rubel said the cork bark dwarf jade is prized for its resilience and its rough-textured bark. It was originally developed in the 1970s by a Southern California grower named Frank Yee.

Rubel explained on the Barrington Bonsai website that Yee unintentionally created the cork bark jade when he applied the now-banned pesticide DDT to his garden. The DDT killed everything in Yee's garden, including all his standard Portulacaria afra or dwarf jade bonsai plants.

Yee noticed some of the remaining trees, also dwarf jades, were developing corking bark. He propagated, sold, and taught about the new variety for 50 years, and every cork bark dwarf jade is a descendant of those first ones in Yee's garden, the website noted.

When Yee passed away in 2023, Rubel purchased his collection, and brought it all the way from Los Angeles to Illinois.

What started as a small hobby has grown into a business, as Rubel he ships trees all over the U.S. and Europe. It has also grown into a community — since Rubel posted his trees online, the response has been overwhelming.

"I put up a Facebook Marketplace group, and it's just exploded," he said.

Now, Rubel hosts small group lessons, helping newcomers learn the art of bonsai one branch at a time.