I needed to figure out why the health of this trident maple bonsai had been suffering so i started by removing the matted roots i was a bit suspicious when i found intact soil anyway i kept on digging what do you know i found some drainage screen inside the root ball they had taken it from one pot and plunked it into a bigger pot it hindered the passage of water and oxygen through the root system i used to spend time in the garden you know pottering with plants after a stressful day at work i was looking around on pinterest for inspiration and came across bonsai and straight away i knew that’s it that’s for me there is quite a steep learning curve it’s very easy to pick up a tree to find a tree from somewhere or a simple plant and tried to turn it into bonsai but very quickly you find that it’s not so easy to keep them alive and healthy now it’s not particularly difficult it’s just that it’s counter to a lot of things you might learn if you have houseplants or if you’ve got flowers in the garden and there’s a lot of information out there but it’s knowing it’s picking and knowing which information applies to you which information doesn’t apply to you i started trying to teach myself and i lost a few trees along the way made a lot of mistakes and still do but it’s a learning process you can make bonsai out of just about any tree and many shrubs as well as long as they’ve got a woody trunk and look a little bit tree like it’s not a specific species some people say that bonsai is a process rather than a product and there’s some truth in that there’s always new things to learn there’s always enhancements to the techniques and the tree itself is always changing there’s never a time when you say this is finished it’s always progressing there’s always work to be doing on it but also more spiritually i guess you’d say i find it quite a meditative process to work on a tree but also it develops this really intimate connection with nature in the sense that you gain all these insights about the complexities of how nature works how nothing in nature is isolated which is kind of ironic because you’ve isolated this tree in a pot the tree is taking in carbon dioxide to the leaves oxygen to the roots sunlight to produce its energy it’s just this whole one big system and it’s kind of mind-blowingly fascinating once you really start to look into it for a tree life is constant struggle it’s constant battle against the elements so the things we do to create a beautiful bonsai to a tree aren’t actually that invasive a tree is quite happy to drop a limb it’s perfectly happy to kill off and regrow roots if there’s better conditions and in a different direction in the soil you’re actually forming a relationship with the tree the tree wants to have a branch in a certain position i might guide the branch so that it can make the best use of the light to help it realize that it doesn’t need to become a big tree to compete its neighbours and whatnot we’re trying to persuade it to realise that life is good being a small tree in a pot
