But at the Arboretum's National Bonsai and Penjing Collection, it's extreme tree petiteness that's being strived for. This week bonsai maestro Yusuke Uchida from Nagoya, Japan, is working at the collection, imparting his knowledge of the venerable art. On Wednesday morning he was busily, artfully, surgically at work with his special kit of tools and with specifically made-for-bonsai-work copper wire, improving the personality of an already bonsaied species of juniper.

Japanese bonsai masters attract special respect (Uchida studied for four years with the especially venerated bonsai master Junichiro Tanaka), because bonsai is a Japanese art form, albeit with Chinese origins. From the sixth century Japanese visitors to China were going ''Gosh!'' at dwarf trees and bringing them home as souvenirs/artworks. The not wholly dependable Wikipedia says that in 970 the first lengthy work of fiction in Japanese emerged. It was The Tale of the Hollow Tree and it contains the barracking-for-bonsai sentiment that ''A tree that is left growing in its natural state is a crude thing. It is only when it is kept close to human beings who fashion it with loving care that its shape and style acquire the ability to move one.''

Yes, everywhere at the Arboretum's bonsai display on Wednesday there were tiny trees rescued from lifetimes of crudity. Every tree in the display comes, like a painting in an art gallery, with the name of its creator, because bonsai is an art form and these are works of art and need to be signed.

And one shocking ramification of this, we discovered on Wednesday and in discussion with a loitering bonsai enthusiast, is that there are bonsai thieves in the same way that there are art thieves. This is a great source of angst for bonsai creators and collectors because, with bonsai creations having to be kept out of doors almost all of the time, and, because they are such small and portable works of art, they are a thieves' delight. Bonsai people, my informant informed me (declining to give me his surname or to be identified in this story), suppress their surnames and even keep them out of their journals and newsletters lest thieves find where they and their bonsai treasures live. He told harrowing stories of thefts made doubly awful by the fact that as well as being valuable, the works can represent decades of their owners' investments of love and artistry.

Maestro Uchida, who has little English, explained with the help of the collection's curator, Leigh Taafe, that one of the things bonsai artists strive for is an appearance of great antiquity in their trees. The adolescent juniper he was working on had, in his eyes, an unacceptably upright and youthful look, and so he was doing everything he could to make it look bowed and ancient. Some of the stars of the Arboretum's collection are teenage banksia and bottlebrush species that look old and gnarled enough to have been among God's first plantings in the Garden of Eden.

Where Uchida's juniper wanted to be upright and sprightly he was using wires to drive it to grow more droopingly. The juniper and others he's been working on here at the Arboretum looked very trussed-up and corrected.

This columnist, struggling with a slight prejudice against bonsai (and in favour of unleashing trees to gambol and frolic), was reminded of an unforgettable visit to a hospital's orthopaedic ward, where the prone and under-repair patients were attached to elaborate systems of wires and pulleys.

My anonymous contact advised that Canberra is a cool place for bonsaistas. Our four seasons and the ''bracing'' (for humans) climate is helpful, too, to bonsaied plants. They require a lot of attention (they live outdoors, remember, and in their shallow trays they require frequent but artful watering lest they become as dry as a dead dingo's donger in a few forgetful days). Bonsai enthusiasts in hotter, drier Australia have special challenges.

But even in Canberra, he told me, the bonsai enthusiast is to an extent enslaved by his or her enthusiasm. There are meteorologically perilous times of the year when you don't dream of going away anywhere because your teeny trees need you at home to water and tend them religiously and carefully.

Maestro Uchida, cheerful and enthusiastic, busily snipping at leaves and snaking the special soft copper wire along and around tiny trunks and branches, told us of the great pleasure he gets from his bonsai works.

Best of all for him is that he sees again and again how the contemplation of them leaves people so very happy. He beamed as he told us that a beautiful work of bonsai, like any beautiful work of art, fills those who see it with joy. Their joy in turn leaves him, the artist, feeling joyous.