OK, let's continue a bit further on the subject of starting your own collection. Another, rather interesting option is to see if the garden centers or nurseries have any rejected young trees that they may be willing to sell at a reduced price. These could have good bonsai potential, perhaps being rejected because of misshapen trunks, so already on the way to having an aged look. It should be possible to turn these into bonsai by removing them from their pots, teasing out and trimming the roots, eliminating the tap rot and removing unwanted and dead twigs and branches.
Let's look into starting our collection from cuttings a little deeper, for next to using actual young trees it is probably the best and most popular way of building a collection. This is because you can be sure your bonsai tree will have the same characteristics as its parent.
Softwood cuttings are best taken from deciduous trees and shrubs during June and
July from current year's growth, firm, ripe, non woody. They should be 3” to 4” long and cut cleanly from the parent just below a leaf node. Remove the lower leaves leaving a clean stem for inserting into the mixture; I use potting compost mixed with about thirty percent sharp sand and dip the end of the cutting in hormone rooting powder. It helps to provide a warm, moist atmosphere, easily achieved by covering with a clear plastic or polythene. After rooting of course-six to eight weeks- they will need to be potted up in their own pots and given protection, overwintering in a frost free environment.
Hardwood cuttings are reckoned to be the easiest to deal with, and these can be taken during the winter months when deciduous trees are dormant. Longer cuttings, 6” to 9” cut, again just below a leaf node, making sure you have ripe wood. After removing any foliage make a sloping cut just above a leaf node, this will indicate the top, and a clean cut at the base just below a leaf node. Root them in a mixture as above, and after nine to twelve months you should have a good strong root system to pot on. Some suitable plants are willow, poplar, forsythia, flowering currant, but there are many more of course…just keep looking!
Going to Pot
When you have your cuttings or seedlings to pot up the subject of containers enters the picture. In the early days of your bonsai cultivation the type of pot is not important, that comes later. What is important is drainage, your container must have adequate drainage otherwise you get water logging then root rot. If you are using plastic containers it's easy to cut a hole in the bottom, likewise with ceramics or earthenware using a masonry drill bit. It is advisable to put in a layer of pebbles before the compost mixture as this will facilitate the drainage.
The pots in which you keep and maybe display your more mature bonsai trees play an important part in the subject as a whole, the containers are an essential part of the bonsai culture. The main characteristic of a bonsai pot is that it is shallow, allowing the whole trunk and maybe surface roots to be viewed. They are usually plain, glazed or unglazed, but with the essential drainage.
It's as well to state here that the art of bonsai culture is no short term project as you can imagine, for we are growing trees. They have their seasons just like trees in the wild, but unlike trees in the wild ours are nurtured and pampered, fed and watered. It can take many years to develop a genuine bonsai tree with character, the object being to attain that aged look, a miniature representation of a tree having grown and survived in a natural environment.
Of course, if you don't have the time to grow you own and have the money, you can go out and buy ready made bonsai trees in the correct pots…with an instruction leaflet on how to care for them! But where is the satisfaction in that? One unfortunate side effect of this market is that someone may have bought and owned a tree for only a few weeks then enters it in a show…and wins!
The word art is often used in connection with bonsai, being considered so, living art in fact. It is the result of a variety of disciplines; horticultural, technical, artistic, and philosophical. How far you take that depends upon how deeply you pursue the subject. Some say that the absence of any one of those disciplines will cause the subject to fall short of perfection. Well, none of us are perfect, so why expect it of a little tree?
The philosophical aspect of bonsai culture goes back to its origins, around 600AD in China. Taoists carried out extensive research into plants searching for elixir of life; they believed that by miniaturizing a plant they could concentrate all its magical qualities. They did, in fact, acquire a vast fund of knowledge of natural medicines. Chinese scroll paintings dating back to this period depict miniature trees in beautiful ceramic pots, and these trees are very similar to Chinese bonsai grown today.
You may well be saying, "but we always thought that bonsai was a Japanese thing." Well so it is, but it originally started in China, as above. We'll touch on that a little in future. 'bye for now.
