History of MBS Exhibiting at the State Fair

The Minnesota Bonsai Society first participated in the Minnesota State Fair in 1975. That year MBS and the Minnesota Horticultural Society shared the room and held a joint show. The club was only four years old, still small, and the members probably weren’t sure they would have enough trees to fill the room the first year. The show was held in the same room MBS uses today. The white boxes and tiered tables were covered with burlap that first year. A member hand-lettered tree identification tags as the trees were brought in. The bleacher area, hidden now by our cloth backdrops, was used to partition the back of the room into a rest area for members. In the early days a small group of club members spent hours creating their own displays using handmade shoji screens and tokonomas, staffing the show, and promoting bonsai.