About Old Tree Yard
This is not a polished corporate nursery, and we'd like to keep it that way. Old Tree Yard is a side project with deep roots — started after hours, funded by stubbornness, and built to last longer than we will.
Wesley has been keeping bonsai for years — around twenty of them, each with a name, a flaw, and a plan. Tyron has a farm outside Ballito with a quiet corner doing nothing, a workshop full of hardwood offcuts, and a habit of turning ideas into systems, websites and films.
One evening the obvious finally got said out loud: put the trees on the land, build the benches properly, film everything, and see how far patience can take two people. The trees moved in. The yard had begun.
There was no business plan at first — just a shared belief that the North Coast deserves a real home for bonsai: a place to buy a good tree, rescue a bad year, and learn the craft without pretence.
Producer · Tech · Woodwork & AI Systems
Builds everything that isn't alive: the website, the films, the brand, the business systems — and, in the workshop, the stands and the entrance sign. Brings AI-powered production into the yard so a two-person operation can tell stories like a studio.
Believes a hand plane and a render farm belong to the same craft tradition: both reward patience and punish shortcuts.
Camera · Code · Chisels · The edit suite
Bonsai Specialist · Channel Face · Green Thumb
The reason the trees are alive. Years of quiet study, a personal collection of about twenty bonsai, and the rare ability to look at a half-dead trunk and see the next thirty years. Wesley fronts the YouTube channel and leads every styling, rescue and repot.
Also keeps the books balanced — because a yard that can't count can't last.
Shears · Wire · Soil mixes · The ledger
Future Marketing · Sales · Admin & Customer Experience
Wesley's wife, and the yard's future front of house. As Old Tree Yard grows from weekend project to working nursery, Leandra steps into marketing, sales, admin and the customer experience — the warmth people remember after they've taken a tree home.
For now she keeps the other two honest, which is a full-time role in itself.
People · Plans · The welcome at the gate
Bonsai is the opposite of almost everything else we're told to want. It cannot be scaled, hacked or rushed. A tree shaped over forty years simply contains forty years — there is no shortcut, and that honesty is the entire appeal.
The Japanese tradition gives us the discipline: restraint, asymmetry, respect for age. The South African farm gives us the rest — sun, space, hard hands and the habit of fixing things instead of replacing them. Old Tree Yard lives where those two meet.
"You don't finish a bonsai. You just hand it to whoever comes next." — Wesley, on the first day at the yard
The trees are pruned by hand. The stands are planed by hand. The soil is mixed by hand. Then the story of all that handwork is told with the most modern tools we can find — AI-assisted editing, 3D growth models, and an interactive atlas built in code.
We don't see a contradiction. Technology, used quietly, lets a small farm yard teach like an institution — without ever pretending to be one. The craft stays old. Only the telling is new.
Keep old trees alive and in good hands — including the ones that arrive here forgotten.
Take neglected bonsai through honest rehabilitation, season by season, scar by scar.
Pass the craft on plainly — care sheets, workshops, and the Atlas — so KZN keepers start better than we did.
Match good trees to the right keepers at honest prices, with the full story attached.
Film the whole journey, mistakes included, so the record outlives the moment.
Make the yard a place North Coast growers actually gather — open days, shared benches, traded cuttings.
Right now Old Tree Yard is a side project — and we'd rather say that plainly than dress it up. The benches are still being built. The first episodes are still being cut. The capital is mostly patience. What we promise is direction, not polish: every season the yard gets a little older, a little wiser, a little more worth visiting.
Signed off the way everything leaves this yard — by hand, and only when it's ready.