to six-inch pots. These groomed starters, which need a minimum of pruning and often have large roots to expose upon repotting, can be planted in nice pottery and will look good immediately.
Depending on the size and quality of your local garden center and the area where you live, some of the varieties discussed here may be available as nursery stock plants in one-, two-, or five-gallon nursery pots. Australian cherries, pomegranates, olives, myrtles, figs, rosemary, and citrus are widely available in larger pots even in colder climates where they aren’t planted outside as nursery stock. Plants ordered through the Internet will likely be young and small, allowing you to develop desired shapes as they grow. Most herbs and scented geraniums will be in pots no larger than six inches or one gallon, although they grow quickly and can be shaped in any direction you choose.
Many bonsai guides offer strict instructions for shaping different bonsai with specific forms, keeping them as diminutive as possible. This book changes the parameters, presenting bonsai that are larger than usual and pruning times and patterns that are directed toward production of meaningful crops. Some may be satisfied with a symbolic crop from a classic bonsai, but this book considers production of a useful crop to be an important part of the bonsai experience. It also focuses on creating larger bonsai than is typical in order to maximize production.
The best way to accomplish this goal is to purchase a good-sized nursery plant and “carve” an instant bonsai. It is usually easy to find good-sized blooming or fruiting citrus plants in five-gallon nursery pots. These can be minimally shaped and repotted into nice pottery, giving you an impressive specimen with a couple hours’ work. The first edible fig plant I trained as a bonsai was a nursery “standard” in a five-gallon pot, delivered as a two-foot-diameter ball of foliage atop a forty-eight-inch stem. I let the plant grow and bear a first crop of figs that first summer. When it went dormant in the fall, I took a saw to the stem two feet above the ground, leaving an unbranched stubby trunk. When it sent out new shoots in the spring I left the ones I wanted and pinched them several times. The tree grew a nice shape that summer and bore figs again. After another year of growing and pinching tips, that fig bonsai has a full crown that is quite impressive in the summer and bears a large crop of figs. Taking a large older plant and cutting it back dramatically can be the quickest way to create a spectacular bonsai in a relatively short period of time. Besides figs, I’ve also done this with guavas, citrus, Natal plums, and Australian cherries. Some of these were left with two-inch diameter stubs and essentially no foliage, yet grew out a nice crown over the next year with regular pruning.
Although it may not be as dramatic, a nice nursery plant can often be pruned heavily, removing a third to more than half of the plant’s branches and foliage, to create a beautiful bonsai immediately. This is where it is important to have a selection of plants to choose from, so you can select the inner structure that will create the best bonsai. In addition to a good main trunk, the ideal bonsai should have a nice main branch to one side some distance above the ground. It should be balanced by another branch, slightly higher up on the opposite side, for balance. A third branch should grow from the back of the bonsai, providing depth. These branches should come from different spots on the trunk rather than from the same original leaf node. The lowest branch should be the thickest, with each succeeding branch being a little smaller. Branches that project across the front, crossing the trunk and obscuring the inner bonsai, should be removed. Of course, it is unlikely that a large nursery plant will have this perfect shape, but hopefully you have picked out something with good enough balance and shape to give you something to work with. The three plants illustrated in this chapter were purchased at a local garden center in Fort Collins, Colorado, near my mountain home. The store offered a selection of six strawberry trees, a dozen myrtle-leaved oranges, and about thirty Key limes for me to choose my specimens from.
The tallest growing tips were pruned when shaping the crown of this Key lime bonsai.
Citrus can be very easy to shape as bonsai. The large Key lime shown here was about forty inches tall in a three-gallon pot. It had just finished blooming and had some pea-sized fruits. It was easy to see the future shape in this plant even before anything had been trimmed. Only five growing tips were cut back, leaving the height of the specimen thirty inches from ground level when finished.
Removing a strong branch that was too low on the trunk of this tree.
Fresh soil being added when potting the trimmed Key lime bonsai.
More than a dozen small, stubby, or spindly shoots were removed from the bottom half of the tree. A few that could have been removed were left because they carried small fruits. These would be removed after fruiting to better expose the open branch form. The foliage crown was pruned from the bottom up, exposing the bonsai structure, and the tips were pinched to fill out the top of the crown. One thicker branch was removed from below the main fork to open up the bonsai, allowing a good view of the flowing symmetry of the two main branches.
The front of the nursery tree in the photo became the rear of the finished bonsai, showing the scar where the branch was removed. The marks where some other branches were removed are visible; they will darken and scar over with age. Because not much foliage needed to be removed from this specimen, the root ball was reduced very little. I exposed a little less than one inch of trunk stem and just roughed up the edges of the root ball, adding some fresh soil in a pot big enough to give the bonsai some room to grow.
Finishing the Key lime by covering the soil surface with gravel.
Completed Key lime bonsai. This specimen is thirty inches tall.
If you look closely, you can see I lost some small Key limes with that larger branch, but it needed to be removed to look good, and there are other fruits on the specimen. The left-flowing movement of the two main branches is pleasing to the eye and is balanced by the foliage to the right, even though the two main branches cross each other slightly. It may not have the “perfect” shape, but it’s still a very attractive bonsai with strong branches, a nice full crown, and a crop of small Key limes. Less than one month after shaping, this bonsai had new flower buds opening. After dressing the soil surface with fine pea gravel, I placed a snow-capped-mountain rock behind the bonsai to draw attention through the plant, giving an illusion of depth with a mountain in the distance.
The myrtle-leaved orange specimen shown here was twenty-four inches tall in a one-gallon nursery pot, and was covered with clusters of little oranges. The crown didn’t need to be cut back to obtain a nice shape, which was a good thing because there were orange clusters on the branch tips. One larger branch was removed from below the main fork, and a few oranges went with it, although there are several dozen left on the bonsai. A number of short branches and leaves were removed to expose the trunk and branch structure and to define the lower limit of the crown.
Pruning leaves and small branches from a myrtle-leaved orange tree.
Using a pointed bamboo stick to remove soil and expose the roots of the newly carved bonsai.
During repotting, a sharpened bamboo stick was used to loosen soil around the roots and base of the tree, exposing almost two inches of trunk that
