Our story
A rabbit hole, a living room full of trees, and an idea.
Zion Bonsai
Zion Bonsai cultivates stillness, curiosity, and connection — one tree at a time.
How it started
It started during COVID.
My husband, Landon, fell down a bonsai rabbit hole on YouTube — the kind where it’s suddenly 2am and you’re watching Peter Chan wire a juniper in the UK.
In 2021 he ordered his first tree from Amazon. Inspired by Gilbert Cantu of Little Jade Bonsai, he started with a dwarf jade, forgiving enough to grow indoors. One plant turned into two, then a small collection quietly taking over our back room.
The wiring, the ancient technique, the soil science? Information overload for me. I just wanted something pretty to look at, and I wasn’t too keen on the “rules.”
Then our youngest was born in 2022. Postpartum complications blindsided me, and some days all I could do was sit and watch Landon trim his trees.
Somewhere in that fog, I started sitting with them myself. Not to learn anything or get it right. Just to be near something quiet and alive. The trees didn’t ask anything of me. They kept growing, at their own pace, on their own terms. Slowly, so did I.
Bonsai taught me to give myself the same grace I gave those trees.
Landon brought the knowledge. I found the heart of it. And eventually I wondered: what if other people could have this too?
If you’re in a hard season of your own, there’s a seat for you at our table.
Who we are
Landon & Cass, the how and the why.
Cass and Landon, with Cheesecake in his blue pot.
Landon
Soil, roots and technique. He learned the traditional art and brings that knowledge to the table, minus the jargon.
Cass
A floral designer’s eye, and the aesthetic and feel of it all. She likes making something beautiful without needing to know all the rules.
Together we made workshops that respect the art form and stay approachable for real people with real lives. We live here, and we’re raising our family here.
Cass and Landon.
Why Zion?
The name started with a place. We spent the first eight years of our marriage in St. George, and Zion National Park became one of the places we felt most at peace: the red rock, the wide vistas, the stillness. Those colors are woven into everything we make, because we want our workshops to feel the way that canyon feels.
But Zion means more to us than a park. In our faith as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Zion describes a people “of one heart and one mind,” a oneness we try to build in our home and our community. That hope isn’t ours alone. It echoes through the Hebrew psalms, through the Christian longing for a city of peace, and through the quiet traditions bonsai itself grew from. Through the ancient art of bonsai, we want to help nurture the Zion in all of us: connection to nature, to God, and to each other.
Our trees have a way of teaching us along the way. Landon puts it like this:
“Zeus taught me a lot about not fighting things you can’t control. He was basically a side branch forced into becoming a main trunk, and despite my early mistakes, he never stalled out. He just rerouted his energy and kept going. Plants don’t care about the setback; they just adapt and put out new leaves. It’s been a really good reminder that you can’t always pick the situation, but you can always decide where to put your energy.”
For us, a lot of that energy goes into small things, like taking an extra fifteen seconds to look the cashier in the eye, say hello, and really ask how they’re doing. At seventeen, Cass worked as a housekeeper and learned firsthand how it feels when people look through you instead of at you. When Landon worked at Dixie State University (now Utah Tech University), he knew everyone by name, from the custodian who emptied his office trash to the vice presidents. People are people. Titles shouldn’t matter.
Bonsai gives us room to practice that. Some days our ten minutes with the trees is just watering them, or sitting and taking in their beauty. That’s often enough to quiet an anxious mind so we can show up a little calmer. Other days, “I’ll trim this one tree” turns into hours of shaping half the collection. Either way, time with a tree, spent reflecting on the blessings we’ve been given, makes us a little more whole.
This is how we try to show up for our boys, our friends, and the wonderful people at our local gas station, who see us several times a day for our daily dose of Mormon caffeine. And it’s what we hope you’ll find in a workshop: a little more of the Zion in you.
Meet Cheesecake
Our oldest tree, and he knows it.
Cheesecake is our oldest bonsai, and he’s at every workshop.
He’s six now. Landon started him as a cutting in a plastic Cheesecake Factory cup, from one of our kids. Look at him now.
Unplug. Create. Grow.
Come grow with us.
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