Before, bonsai care and design skill was limited to the much revered Lingnan prune-and-grow method developed by the ancient Chinese philosophers responsible for the Literati school of landscape painting and design. It was not until the turn of the 20th century that the Japanese, in an attempt to achieve natural shapes in an expedient amount of time, developed wiring as another training technique suitable for bonsai. And these two schools of thought persist today.

Most of us use bonsai pruning compound (or bonsai cut sealer) to seal the wound of the trunk or branch after we prune our bonsai tree with shears or cutters. Bonsai pruning sealer helps the cut area to retain the valuable moisture required to heal the cut properly and minimize the scar. And moreover, it
[continue reading...]

A few days ago, my bonsai teacher asked me to pick off all the leaves from a bonsai tree. This is called defoliating, a way to stimulate the tree to grow new branches and smaller leaves.

Small bonsai such as shohin bonsai and mame bonsai are small enough to be held comfortably in the palm of the hand. Mame bonsai should not exceed 8-15cm in height, while shohin bonsai should not exceed 15-20cm. While the size is much smaller, the care and shaping of these small bonsai trees are the same
[continue reading...]

The time it takes to develop the shapes and train the branches of our bonsai trees is often painfully long. And it will be worse if we make a wrong cut after months of waiting for the bonsai tree to finally has its branches developed as trained. During the developing and training stage, we surely
[continue reading...]

My bonsai teacher, Mr Wong, always says, “I don’t worry that my trees won’t grow, but worry only that they become overgrown.” I had never really known how bad of a problem an overgrown bonsai tree could be until I saw a real-life example last week when I was working with Teacher Wong in the
[continue reading...]