I wish I could say I was the Cecil Adams of bonsai, but alas – I’m a great admirer, but an incompetent practitioner. Forget about wiring, pruning and shaping – I have a hard time even keeping the things alive. With those tiny pots, the trees dry out in a flash in summer, and freeze to death in winter.
So I’m trying something new this year – large-format bonsai. I figure by using an eight-inch terracotta pot, and aiming for a somewhat larger tree – maybe two feet high – I can get a more robust plant that won’t dry out so readily in summer, and can overwinter out of doors. Maybe what I’m creating is too large to be called “bonsai.” Godzilla bonsai, perhaps? In recent years, because of my poor luck with pots, I’ve been training the trees while leaving them in the ground. This spring I’ve already dug up and transplanted one (an American elm), and maybe I’ll try a few more and see how it goes. The saving grace is that I’m just using weed trees from my yard and the neighborhood, so I can afford to experiment. I’ve got a fair number of yews, Japanese maples, crabapples, elms, and mountain ash.
My grandmother traveled to Japan to study bonsai there. She taught me to train them with her. I don’t have any, due to current living situation, but look forward to when I can have some again.
I’m clueless. I do, however, OWN a little bonsai of what I believe is the juniper variety. I bought it at the Boston flower show. It has a little statue of a man reading a book at the base of the tree.
Additionally, it has weeds. That’s right…I actually have weeds growing in my houseplants. I haven’t pulled them because I want to see what they are when they grow up to be big weeds.
Otherwise, the little tree seems to be perfectly healthy. I water it nearly every day. I hope that’s appropriate.
Acid Lamp has a bonsai habit. We’re moving, and the biggest problem is going to be getting all those bonsai and voodoo lilies into the moving van without them getting damaged. Of course, we’re in a completely different zone than you (we’re in 9 and you appear to be at least two or three zones north of us), so we/he might be able to advise you on technique, but not necessarily cultivation of species good for your area.
IIRC, he’s a fan of BonsaiWeb, which also has a message board.
I don’t think bonsai has a size limit. A quick Google search turned up Giant Sequoia bonsai.
There used to be a bonsai how-to series, at least I think it was a series, I only saw it twice and both were the same episode. The host bought three cherry saplings from a home & garden center and combined them into a single bonsai tree.
My Japanese wife has been doing boinsai for many years, and we have lot of them. After moving to Arizona, it got more difficult to keep outside bonsai due to the heat and dry air, so most are the indoor variety now.
It really is an art form, and you have to know how to prune the branches as well as the roots periodically. Shaping and wiring is part of the job, unfortunatley, to get really artistic trees.
It is unfortunate that so many places sell what they call bonsai, which are just seedling trees stuck into a pot, and don’t give any directions or instructions.
Constant watering is a must, as the root system is so shallow, and even spraying the tree with water helps.
I can’t recall how many times people have brought her a potted bonsai and asked her what is wrong with it. She reluctantly has to tell them the basic problem is that it is dead.
I’m all too familiar with that particular fly in the ointment! Especially with evergreens (like the aforementioned juniper), where the corpse can exhibit quite remarkable degrees of preservation.
Hey Sal, I certainly wouldn’t call that “godzilla” by any measure! Really large trees often require eight men to carry them about. I’ve found that really there aren’t any hard and fast rules to bonsai at all. In order to conquer florida’s recent heatwave and droughts, I basically had to re-invent the wheel. One of the best tools you can use is the plastic hanging basket. Take off the hangers, or alternatively find a plastic bowl about the same shallow shape. These are usually deep enough to allow you to grow and work on your trees while retaining enough soil moisture. I use 14’ diameter terracotta colored plastic bowls I buy from a garden store. A few holes poked in the base and you are good to go. My soil mix is a blend of organic potting soil, shultz’s aquatic plant potting soil, and orchid bark. Most trees are not ready for bonsai pots until LONG after you’ve transplanted them to these training pots. It will take a long time until the root systems will develop that is appropriate for such a pot. Luckily, using these type pots will give you a lot of time to work on your roots, as well as the shaping of the tree while keeping things neat and portable. Collected trees are best developed by trying to keep as much of the root base at first as you can. Don’t be afraid to lop off most of the trunk and branches either. It’s a lot easier to re-grow branches than it is to correct a bad trunk.
So a few pointers:
Yews: These guys REALLY, REALLY, hate having their roots fooled with. If you are going to transplant them, do it all in one go and place them in a location that gets regular water and filtered light until it recovers.
Maples: In your area they are probably hardy; go nuts and have fun. Remember to water frequently, heat is the enemy.
Crabapples, elms, and the rest: Fairly hardy and fast growing. Remember to prune off all branches except the ones you want to keep. All of these species will continue to bud back if you let them go for too long.
I learned about bonsai via the university library’s collection of books (great for learning theory and aesthetics and about botany in general) and from helping Acid Lamp trim and prepare plants to become bonsai. It takes patience and a willingness to learn the patterns and structures you’re looking for when buying stuff out of the plant nursery to make into proto-bonsai, but it’s rewarding as long as you only start out with one or two until you get the hang of it.
One bit of warning, though; although juniper does okay as a ground covering shrub down here, it gets too hot for it to be a good bonsai in this area. They just die off as soon as it gets too warm or too dry.
ETA: You live not too far from UCF, and you also have a lot of libraries in your county. Start out with looking for books on plants that do well in Florida and bonsai (rare to find a book that covers both topics), then see if you can apply those skills while poking around in a plant nursery that has a lot of specimens to look at. You’ll start to get an idea about what’s going to make good bonsai by looking at the root structure, the trunk, and how it spreads out into stems. It’s a bit of a shortcut in comparison to doing it from seed, but it’ll be a good way to start until you feel ready to do bonsai from seed. You can get little clippers and stuff from Lowe’s and the myriad Asian supermarkets in the area.
Auto, you don’t live far from me at all. We ought to get together some time and talk bonsai. I’ve got a load of plants that I’d be willing to part with if you’d like some starter stock.
I’ve done it off and on over the years, usually giving them away when I have to move somewhere. Right now I’ve got a Metasequoia and a Vine Maple going well.
I tired to keep a bonsai tree many moons ago and failed miserably but I am much more mature now (hee hee) and ready to try again. I live just north of an old reputatble bonsai dealer but Harry’s Market has had them for decades. I’ve been watching a glorious Japanese Maple for over a year and I want it bad. It’s $50 and is supposed to be about 50 years old and it is gorgeous. I think I’ll be pretty diligent caring for it since there are no pets now and the Offspring is a teen. I am even looking forward to getting a tiny rake to pick up the leaves in fall. It’s just grinding my ass that it’s fifty bucks but that’s no so bad for a hobby and pet, is it? Is it?
My major question is - do you have to keep them outdoors? I think that’s what killed my first tree but the Dairy Queen we go to has a japanese maple as a shrub by the pick up window so this might be a climate it can survive in, right?
50.00 for a nice japanese maple is a STEAL. Landscape container maples routinely go for hundreds down here. :eek: A specimin already adjusted to it’s pot and 50 years old is a hell of a deal at that price. Most maples do need a dormant period in the winter. You don’t have to keep it outside, but it will need to be kept somewhere where it can go through it’s dormancy cycle.
I agree, $50 bucks is a steal. Check to make sure it isn’t plastic! (Though that would solve your dormancy problem).
Speaking of which, it’s the dormancy thing I found really difficult here in these northern climes. I never found anywhere good for the things to overwinter indoors, so now I’m trying the outdoors route. My idea at the moment is to half-bury the pots, and give them a good blanket of mulch.
Wednesdays and Sundays are good for me.