**Winner of the 2017 Creative Child Magazine Preferred Choice
Award **
**Winner of the 2015 Gelett Burgess Award for Best Intercultural
Book**
**Winner of the 2015 Silver Evergreen Medal for World Peace**
This true children's story is told by a little bonsai tree, called
Miyajima, that lived with the same family in the Japanese city of
Hiroshima for more than 300 years before being donated to the National
Arboretum in Washington DC in 1976 as a gesture of friendship between
America and Japan to celebrate the American Bicentennial.
From the Book:
"In 1625, when Japan was a land of samurai and castles, I was a tiny
pine seedling. A man called Itaro Yamaki picked me from the forest where
I grew and took me home with him. For more than three hundred years,
generations of the Yamaki family trimmed and pruned me into a beautiful
bonsai tree. In 1945, our household survived the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima. In 1976, I was donated to the National Arboretum in
Washington D.C., where I still live today--the oldest and perhaps the
wisest tree in the bonsai museum."