In this blog post I wanted to show the styling of a rather peculiar shimpaku I bought in '23. Below you can see the tree as I bought it. It only had three branches, one of which (the on on the right) was rather unhealthy and weak. They were very far apart, so I decided to cut the top one and make it into a deadwood feature (ten-jin in Japanese). 

In this blog I want to show how  I go about repotting and lightly pruning the roots of Japanese maple bonsai that are still in development. Note that the tree in this example is still being grown out to thicken the trunk. Since I want as much energy as possible going into the tree, I won't prune that many roots .

Instead of a blog, I made a vlog! I made a video of me pruning, wiring and styling this very old juniper raft. I bought this tree last year and waited till now to style it. It was a bit overgrown and neglected for the last couple of years. Because of that, the branches had grown leggy, and the foliage was very course.

Two years ago, I grew a bunch of Zelkova serrata (Japanese elm) from seed. The goal was to develop them into formal broom style trees, or 'Hokidachi' in Japanese.

This is an imported Trident maple (A. buergerianum) that is grown with its roots over a lava rock. Trident maples are often used for this style of bonsai, because their roots grow very fast and strong. When properly attached to a rock, they can grow around it in a couple of years. In my previous blog post you can read about a ROR maple that I'm growing from seed.

This trident maple was grown from seed about 4 years ago. At an early stage, the roots were left to grow long for one year. The following year, the seedling was attached to a piece of rock. For this, I used a combination of hemp and aluminum wire. After it was planted grasping the rock, it was left to grow freely for 2 growing seasons.

In another post I briefly described how I made a triple trunk ('sankan' in Japanese) elm bonsai using cuttings. In this post I will show another example. There are a couple of interesting differences between the two plantings!

Hornbeams (Carpinus betulus) are becoming one of my favorite species for bonsai cultivation. They grow fast, respond well to different pruning techniques and you can easily reduce their leaf size. I also think they make great bonsai for beginners! Only repotting them can be a bit tricky sometimes, as I learned the hard way.

Air layering is a relatively fast and easy method of propagation you can use to create bonsai from larger trees and shrubs. In essence, air layering is way to grow roots on a part of the plant that otherwise wouldn't grow roots, like a branch or in the middle of the trunk. This technique is usually carried out in mid to late spring.

Elms push out lots of new shoots every spring. If you don't keep an eye on it, the canopy fills up fast, even in places where you don't want any new growth. I try to remove any unwanted shoots as soon as possible, as these can cause swelling and inverse taper.

I've grown this field elm (Ulmus minor) for 3 years from cuttings. The trunks were bound together with aluminum wire in the first year after they rooted (below) and now they've already fused together quite nicely.

I grew these dawn redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) from seed about 3 years ago. In the winter of 2019 I cold stratified them in the fridge for a month and then randomly sowed them in a shallow container. This method of creating forest planting can give surprising results, as you don't know what the composition will look like in the end.