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To love plants is to enter a world that moves at the pace of nature, a beat that can be tempered but not hurried. Leaving the hot, dusty street behind you, the entrance to nursery Bonsai & Beyond, in Balmain, Sydney, stretches ahead like a long, cool oasis. Owned by sisters Isavella and Paula Valsamis, a passion for all things green is a family affair. “The love of bonsai starts with my mother,” says Paula. “She grew up in Surry Hills [Sydney] when it was full of Greek and Chinese immigrants. One day, when she was six years old, she saw a bonsai tree through the fence of her Chinese neighbour‘s house, and from that minute she was hooked.”

Neither Isavella, 50, nor Paula, 47, had planned to follow in their mother’s footsteps. Isavella became involved in the family trade through helping her mother, Tina, sell bonsai at markets around Sydney. “Initially it was just about giving her a hand at the markets but eventually it became full-time and I realised I‘d inherited her passion for it,” she explains. Paula likewise ‘fell’ into the family trade. “I trained as an architect,” she says. “I practised for 16 years before joining Isavella in the shop 10 years ago, though I had sold bonsai at Paddington markets for Mum to help pay my way through university.”

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Tina Valsamis, now in her early seventies, grew up surrounded by the business of plants. “We learned at our mother’s side,” says Paula. “She never knew any other life. Our grandfather, Alex, supplied rose wreaths to Kinsella’s, the undertaker, during the 1940s. Everyone knew him as ‘Roses’. To transport them, Mum and her brother would have to walk down Crown Street in Sydney with their arms held out stiffly on either side, each one stacked with rows of wreaths.”

To seek pleasure in slow pursuits has come to be seen as a luxury. Isavella and Paula are fortunate to have been able to turn their passion into a flourishing business. “There’s nothing like taking a plant and turning it into a bonsai,” says Isavella. “You start and you can’t stop. You get so attached to each tree. When I first started, it was difficult to sell them – not knowing who they’d go to, how they’d be cared for – but I learned I had to let go.”

Nurturing a bonsai from a seedling to maturity takes at least five years, and the three women have up to 150 trees in the nursery at any one time. “We take it in turns to go on holiday,” says Isavella with a laugh. “There always needs to be one of us in town to tend them all.”

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