**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**
"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."