This is the time of year, late winter/early spring, when we get busy as bonsai enthusiasts. Mixing soils, cleaning pots, making sure we have enough wire on hand are all part of the season. It is also the time of year when people who have said to themselves, “one of...

Sometime in the next few weeks, if the rain ever stops (!) we will all start moving our trees from winter storage to their summer homes. This can be quite a shock to a trees system, particularly for a tropical that has been indoors for the last several months and...

Also known as “forest plantings,” Saikei are miniature landscapes. Using stones and seedlings on a tray or flat surface the artist adheres to the basic tenants of bonsai, but with a greater freedom in composition. It is a more natural interpretation of bonsai. The...

When someone characterizes a bonsai as a formal upright or chokkan style tree a vision immediately comes to mind. Most of us see a pine tree with a uniformly straight vertical trunk, nicely tapered from the apex to the beginning of the transition to the root base. The...

Bonsai is an art that stimulates the visual sense while reaching a deeper emotional level within the viewer. A good bonsai puts us in touch with nature; it makes us think about our relationship with other living entities and consider the forces that shape our...

If you have a few bonsai trees then you know the feeling. You look at a tree and start to think about how you could improve the design: move a branch here, change the front a little to the left, or maybe an even more radical change. Even a tree styled by a well-known...

The purpose of this post is a general introduction to fertilizing your bonsai. I will focus on the use of fertilizer during the seasons of the year as well as the stage of development for your tree. I will avoid discussing specific brands or commercially available...

There are several main objectives when anchoring a bonsai tree to its container. The first is to stabilize the tree so that the roots do not move. Roots, especially tender feeder roots, are fragile and easily broken. A tree that is allow to move, even slightly, in the...