The Bonsai Patch

This area will contain more pictures of my novice efforts at Bonsai. 

My first Bonsai plant was a Serissa Foetida, the "Tree of a Thousand Stars". It flowers almost continuously throught the year, hence the common name. And it smells of poo when you prune the branches or root system, hence the latin name! They are an absolute pain to keep alive in a centrally heated house in Winter - the leaves all fall off and all the new shoots it produces keep drying up and falling off as well. I have experimented with gravel trays for humidity, and even made a little greenhouse for it (just a stick skeleton covered in cling film). But it seems there's still something major it needs that I haven't given it yet. Either it needs to be warmer at night, or cooler during the day, or it needs more light. Putting it in a South facing window didn't help much - I think there's enough light just about, but when the sun finally comes out it just fries all the leaves off again! This is a great plant to buy cheaply for a season, but you will need special conditions for it to keep it indefinitely. Mine lasted me about 5 years, making it roughly 17 years old altogether. The picture below shows it at about 14 years old. To give an idea of size, the pot is 10cm wide. 

Serissa is one of the easiest plants to propagate that I have ever come across. The only other plants I know which are so easy are Fuchsias. Nip off a shoot in softwood, and jam it in some soil or some clay granules, and that's it. A few weeks later you have a new plant. When I first got this Bonsai, I went along to a local club where I was shown how to prune it. A large lower branch (not in the picture) was removed to improve the shape, and one of the other members took the branch home and stuck it in some soil. Despite being very mature hardwood, the cutting still took immediately! When mine finally popped its clogs, I was given back a cutting from this branch, and the plant lives on. It flowers so profusely that I now take cuttings routinely in Autumn as an insurance policy against future accidents. 

The next plant I bought was also about 10 years old to begin with. Listed as another "indoor" Bonsai, it's a Pistachio. Theoretically capable of producing flowers and edible nuts, I've yet to see either produced in the 6 years since I've had it! I guess our Summer just isn't warm enough. The first couple of Winters were a bit hairy to say the least, with all the leaves dropping off or going crispy despite twice-daily sprayings and a moisture tray. Every Spring it recovered, but it looked terrible (it's supposed to be evergreen...) and death seemed inevitable through stress. So the following year I left it outside to face the elements. It got rained on, hailed on, even snowed on. It was a particularly harsh Winter, and the soil froze to a block of ice for a week. Yet not a single leaf fell off, and I had some serious pruning to do in Spring. The photo below is two years on, and it lives outside most of the year just coming indoors for decoration from time to time in Summer. Now at 18 years old and thriving, I'm very pleased with it. It's not really a classical Bonsai pedigree, but like a scruffy mongrel it's just as lovable :-) 

Things were going well, so I thought it was time to create my own Bonsai. Forget growing from seed... there's no such thing as a Bonsai plant. They are not just grown, but are created from normal living material. Bonsai literally means "Tree in a tray", and they are created by progressively cutting back the root system until it fits in a tiny container. The process is commonly misunderstood - the root system is not jammed into a tiny container to stunt the growth of the tree. Far from it, the roots can be growing extremely vigorously, and indeed need to be to supply a big plant from a small root. The "stunted growth" is all down to careful pruning of the branch structure, which in turn in most plants brings with it the added bonus of making the leaves much smaller. A small tree with big leaves can look rather silly and out of scale, so not all plant material is suitable.

The easiest way to make a Bonsai from cheap material is to visit your local garden centre. I found some "miscellaneous" shrubs selling for less than a pound each, and got to work with the scissors! The plant below is also not a particularly classical Bonsai shape, but it looked good on the garden table in Summer when it was bursting with flowers. And then it died :-(

The wire you can see across the middle of the pot is a soft training wire (usually coated aluminium) which is used for supporting the tree while the roots regrow. It's also used in different thicknesses for bending and setting the trunk and branches, but I never got that far with this one before its demise. Either I overdid the pruning of the roots, or I did too much branch pruning at the same time, or possibly it's one of those species which doesn't take kindly to being chopped around. I'll never know.

Here are some more recent ones...

A Bamboo plantation. Hehehe. This was before I bought a digital camera, and didn't spot that I'd taken a picture of a green plant in front of green grass. Duh...

This was my Chinese Elm in 2002, about the time I bought it. It doesn't look hugely different in the later picture, 2012, 10 years on, so it must be quite some age now, at least 20 years? The pot split in the hard Winter we had in 2011 and I didn't really know what to do with it as it was looking a bit top-heavy. So I took it to a bonsai specialist who repotted it and trimmed and wired it for me. Then all the leaves fell off it. EEEEEEEK! After a nail-biting few months, it suddenly started to poke out some new leaves , and now it's starting to look really nice... 

This Cotoneaster was a seedling under an old parent bush, so I stuck it in a pot to see what would happen. The branches are really springy, and need constant rewiring to persuade them to set where I want them. I'm not really sure where this one is going, but it flowers like crazy and this time it produced a berry. Yay! :o) 

Maples can look fab in Autumn. There are some more spectacular colours available than this one, but this was another freebie seedling I found in the garden about 10 years ago and tweaked it into a formal upright. Only to discover that this is just about the only style that you're NOT supposed to train a Maple into. AAAARGH! 

That's it for now.

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