It is a common theme heard among bonsai enthusiasts that they already have too many trees to take care of and not enough time. There is something in bonsai that makes it like collecting baubles or trinkets. People think, maybe I need a Crabapple, I don’t have one in my collection, or “I need a cascade style tree.” Before long our yards are filled with material and we start selling the trees that we don’t like to make some room. But as soon as we sell a tree we see another that we like so the space is quickly filled in again.

Is this really what bonsai is about? Bonsai is the art of growing and maintaining trees, not collecting them like trinkets on a shelf. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves how we can make the trees that we have better rather than endlessly looking for one that already is better.

Much of the mediocre material that’s out there would benefit from growing techniques rather than refinement techniques. Refinement techniques will shorten the nodes, slow the growth of the branches, cause finer branching and backbudding. But it will not allow the tree to gain a lot of wood. Growing techniques, including high amounts of fertilizer, larger containers and not cutting off growth, will fatten the trunk, make rollovers larger and more rounded, fatten branches and many other things.

Really, what is missing from so many mediocre bonsai is something unique. Many trees come straight out of a nursery container, are chopped back and then refinement is started. This doesn’t allow for the wounds to heal very well and it leaves all the telltale signs that the plant is young. People try a lot of things to disguise problems, but really they should be trying the only thing that really helps -allowing the tree to grow out for a few years.

It seems to me that to make a great bonsai there are many steps. Start with something that has some potential and then the most important step is the first one: do something drastic. Yeah, that’s right, take a wild chance and do something that will totally alter the character of the plant. When I did the Cotoneaster program I chopped a 3-gallon plant down to a 3-inch plant, that was drastic. But that’s just the first step. If that tree is really going to be great it will have to be grown out again. Why?, well, because the scars on the trunk wont heal, and the trunk will be boring or worse, ugly, unless a large amount of growth is put on over what is already there. So step two is to just grow that plant that you did something drastic to for a number of years, don’t worry about refinement so much, just worry about what the trunk looks like. Keep your eyes on the thing, you don’t want it to revert to what you started with, but don’t try to make every branch perfect and little either.

Take a 1-gallon garden center juniper as another example. You can pick these up almost anywhere for as little as eight bucks. Now think about it. If you take this plant and just try to style it you will be beating your head against a wall; the trunk will be too thin, the branches will be too large and the plant will look young. If you just plant it in the ground to get bigger it will, but in the end you’ll have a trunk that’s long, has little taper and has little character. But, if you do something drastic to it, like wiring it into a knot and stripping the bark off of two sides of the trunk and then plant it into the ground for 5 years you’ll have something unlike anything available.

These are just a couple of the things that you can do, but to do them we have to realize that we will be growing the plant for years, and during that time we will not even get the chance to start refining it. Collecting bonsai is a fun thing to do, but when your benches are full and you are looking for something to do with your plants think about growing them instead.

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