The Bonsai Styles

Generally, bonsai are classified according to size, attitude and number of trunks growing from a single root, number of trees in a group planting, and the kind of base the plant has. 

Size classifications recognize the fact that bonsai may grow any where just a few inches high to 3 or 4 feet or (rarely) more. You will hear Japanese names for the categories, but these names vary among experts in the United States. Here are the size classifications:

Miniature bonsai---> under 6 inches

Small bonsai----> from 6 to 12 inches

Medium bonsai---> from 13 to 24 inches

Large bonsai---> over 24 inches

The size you choose for your bonsai may depend on how much space you have for working and display. The city dweller with very limited space may choose to develope a collection of miniature bonsai or one or two small bonsai. Suburbanites with more generous yard areas, on the other hand, might be able to give a great deal of space to their plants, displaying larger bonsai.

The bonsai styles

The most common size for bonsai falls within the small and medium groups. It's often difficult to simulate age in good proportion in the miniature bonsai, and the size of the large bonsai makes them difficult to work with.

Shape and attitude of trunk is another way of classifying bonsai. Most bonsai fall into five main classifications: formal upright (chokkan), informal upright (moyogi), slanting (shakan), semicascade (han-kengai), and cascade (kengai).
Many other classifications are less commonly encountered. Some are variations of one of the five; others are styles once popular but now rarely seen.
Formal and informal upright attitudes are by far the most common; they are also easiest for the beginner to work with because they usually require less manipulations of the trunk than many other styles.
The formal upright style has a perfectly straight trunk, perpendicular to the surface it rest on. The informal upright may have a curve in the trunk and a slight slant; the tip (apex) of the trees will be directly over the base. The slanting style has a more severe slant and the apex will not be over the base. In these three styles, the branches of the tree generally describe the outline of an asymmetrical triangle.
The semicascade tree trunk grows up out of the soil and then cascade usually not lower than the top surface of the container. The full cascade tree also grows upward first and then turns abruptly downward. In its most formal manifestations, the tip of this type of cascade should curve in toward the base and be perpendicular to the vertical center line formed by the trunk and the apex.
Let the tree itself decide what atitude is approriate for it to be trained in, your study of trees in the wild and of other bonsai will help you understand this process. An oak or a maple suggests an upright or possibly a slanting style. Some pines and other conifers insist on upright styles; others clearly lend themselves to cascaded styles. Cypress may seem right only in a slanted, windswept style; zelkove, elm, and trident maple take quite naturally to broom style. Some flowering plants look attractive cascades, wisteria, chrysanthemum, star jasmine, and others appear as a sheet of blossoms when in full flower.
The trunk of a bonsai may be twisted or straight. A twisted trunk is just that, not just bent or curved, but twisted like a piece of taffy. In some cases twoo trees (or twin trunks) can be twisted around each other.
Bonsai with twisted trunks create a spectacular effect. In the wild, twisted trunks are caused by countless years of severe weathering. They are constantly buffeted by winds, smothered in deep snows. A twisted trunk is particularly suited for such mountain trees as California juniper or shimpaku (Sargent juniper). Creating this effect is difficult, and it's best to learn the technique from bonsai instructor.
Multiple trunks characterize another classification of bonsai. One strong, main trunk usually dominates one or more secondary trunks. Traditionally, except in the double-trunk style, bonsai growers avoid even numbers.
Certain characteristics should apply to all multiple-trunk styles. Trunks should divide at the base, not higher up, and form a "V" shape rather than a "U" or bowl shape. All trunks should be of varying heights and thicknesses. Plant the tree so that one trunk is slightly in fron of the others, the trunks should not form a fan shape or a straight line.

• Double-trunk style (sokan). Two trunks grow from a common root system; one trunk is larger than the other. In this style, try to maintain constant proportions between the two trunks: if the larger trunk is twice as thick, it should also be twice as tall. One trunk should be slightly in fron of the other, creating a sense of depth; one should never be directly in front of another, though. If the trunks curve, they should curve in the same direction. Don't place a branch of a smaller trunk. Branches from one trunk should not cross those another. If the trunks are very close together, you can train the branches as though the two trunks were one.
• Clump style (kabubuki, kabudachi). This is a cluster of trunks growing very close together.
• Stump style (korabuki). Here the root forms an aboveground hump from which multiple trunks grow.
• Raft or straight-line style (ikadabuki). These multiple trunks grow in a straight line because they are actually branches growing from a trunk that has been laid on its side under the soil and has become a root.
• Sinous style (netsunagari). This tree is much like the raft style except that the single root weaves about under the soil, causing the trunks to form a curved line.

Group plantings (yose-uye) are composed of trees with separate root systems. For a two tree planting, follow the preceding guidelines for double-trunk plantings. Odd numbers of trees make the most successful groupings of more than two trees, until there are too many trees to count at a glance. To create a forest effect, you'll need at least five trees.

In a group planting, the total effect is more important than the beauty of the individual trees. One tree should be larger than all the others, not to draw attention to itself, but to serve as a focal point for the eye while smaller trees play nearer the edges of vision, creating the forest effect. Because the individual trees merge with the group, forest plantings are often ideal settings for trees with defects that are too pronounced for the trees to be displayed as individual speciments. Spacing of trees should not be uniform, and no two trees should be the same size.

Forest plantings should include, if not identical species and varieties, then similar trees with similar habits and needs. The outline of the whole planting, or of groups within the planting, should form roughly an asymmetrical triangle.

Plantings should not be symmetrical, with the largest tree directly in the center of the spot; rather, trees should be grouped nearer the edges, often with much open area left in the pot, allowing space to create a sense of visual drama. To create a kind of panoramic perspective, plant the largest trees in fron and the smallest trees in back. To simulate a close-up, reverse that, with the smallest trees in front and the largest ones behind. Look carefully at the outside branches of the trees (front branches on front trees, back ones on those behind because they form the outline of the grouping. You can trim off most of the inside branches.

Earth or rock, which will form the base for your bonsai? Will your tree be planted in soil or on a rock? Will the roots be exposed?

Planting directly in soil is much easier than planting on a rock. The tree itself, though, should dictate the kind of base it is planted in. A tree that in nature grows on rocks in the mountains, such as a pine, will look natural on a rock base. Upright trees are most often planted in soil with only a bit of rootage showing just on the surface of the ground. Slanted and cascaded styles frequently have exposed roots since they usually represent plants that grow along rock faces or in situations where earth is washed out from around the roots.

Bonsai, It's Nature and It's Art

Bonsai are not exact duplicates of trees growing in the wild. Rather, they are evocations of the spirit of nature, of the life force of the natural world. They are manmade shapes that suggest nature, as does, say an impressionist painting, rather than duplicate nature, as a photograph might. The artist's feeling for balance, form, and line combine with nature's juices to evoke a larger adn deeper concept.

Viewing bonsai should be a kind of rest, a green pause in the staccato pace of daily life, a brief contact with nature's great calm. A single bonsai might suggest an entire scene to the viewer, with sounds and smells and the feel of the air.

To develop your taste and judgment you'll have to study trees, both those in their natural conditions and those trained as bonsai.

Conifers, good for bonsai style

Learn about trees in the wild by getting out and looking at them. Train yourself to recognize the conditions that make a tree grow in a particular manner. Investigate why a tree is formed in one way, deformed in another. Trees tend to lean toward water, away from wind, toward lowland. Foliage grows so that it will receive maximum sunlight. Trees that cluster in tight groves have most of their foliage high up, and such trees stand straight, most of the branches reaching up instead of out. Trees that are not crowded together usually have bushy foliage and spreading branches.

Pay attention to the conditions of weather, terrain, and soil that affect a tree's growth. Why do some trees have straight trunks and others twisted trunks? Why does a species grow vertically in one place and prostrate in another? Study of trees in nature will give you insight for training bonsai.

Through careful study of bonsai exhibits or photographs, you can also learn a great deal from what others have done. Not only is copying no crime, it's a venerable tradition for beginners and experts alike. Like snowflakes, no trees are ever exactly alike, and your copy of another tree could never produce identical results.

The best way to get a three-dimensional view of bonsai is to study them in person. Inquire about bonsai exhibits and demonstration and bonsai club shows at a local nursery or horticultural society, and attend them whenever you can. If there's a bonsai club in your area, the members' trees may provide worthwhile examples for study. In a club, you'll be able not only to see other trees but also to glean practical advice from other anthusiasts.
Many publications contain photos of outstanding bonsai specimens, they can be helpful in generating ideas for your own bonsai. The purpose of the bonsai portraits in this blog is the same: to display examples of bonsai that are both beautiful to look at and provocative of ideas.
None of the 'rules' offered in this blog should be considered rigid. Instead, take them as flexible guidelines for training your plants. Seldom, if ever, does a really exquisite bonsai flagrantly violate established esthetic standards. But many fine speciments show subtle deviations, perhaps because the tree itself wouldn't bend to an absolutely 'correct' shape or because the artists has experimented a little. And of course, as in other arts, different experts have different standards; different teachers teach different rules.
The following pages will present rules and standards generally accepted as correct, as artistically necessary and sound for creating exquisite bonsai. Beyond that, your experience in the art will determine what peinciple will guide your work.

Bonsai Beauty Is Ageless

The link between bonsai and great age may have wedged itself into your mind: that foot-high tree that's years older than you are. But try to shake loose the notion that a bonsai has to be old to be good. You won't have to wait around for your cotoneaster's bicentennial to see it reach a fullness in maturity and form.

A bonsai may very well be 100 years old, but this doesn't mean that the plant has been under cultivation all the time. True, there are some bonsai that have been constantly in training for 2 or 3 centuries and are veritaable treasures. But many very old bonsai have spent the greater part of their life in the wild, growing in a natural state before being collected and trained for container life.

Bonsai beauty Prunus

Actual age is not what's important in bonsai, apparent age is. Those valued characteristics of great age needn't be naturally come by. Bonsai is an art, and art is the human hand at work, in this case cooperating with nature, perhaps causing a tree just a few years old to look 100 years old.

There are ways to create the appearance of age, peeling of bark from trunk, branches, or exposed roots to make dead wood or scarring and hollowing the trunk.

Evergreen conifers are favorite bonsai subjects precisely because, even when very young, they often give an impression of great age. Decidous trees are more inclined to look their actual age. 

Bonsai: The Roots are in Japan

Appreciate the beauty of the natural world seems to be almost a national trait in Japan. Think of the unsurpassed serenity of a Japanese garden: think of ikebana (flower arranging). Think of the understated sumi landscape paintings.

Because Japan is crowded. And has been crowded from the earliest recorded history. The gardener often has had very little space in which to work. And so he has learned to capture the essence of a natural setting without exactly duplicating it. A Japanese tree garden in a postage stamp space may create the illusion of being the center of a giant forest. A Tokyo courtyard, separated from the street by a single wall, may contain all the serenity of a mountain glade.

Acer Palmatum Bonsai

Perhaps because of crowded, the Japanese gardener characteristically focuses on details rather than on panoramas. In Japan, to capture the essence of one tree, a grouping of flowers and grasses, or even a single rock is to bring all of nature home.

The exact beginning of bonsai are lost in the clouds of time. Though some indications suggest that its origins may lie in the China of over 1500 years ago, the oldest surviving piece of evidence we have about bonsai is a famous Japenese scroll painting 700 or 800 years old, showing a dwarf tree in a ceramic container.
Early Japanese aristocrats displayed a fondness for unusual botanical specimens. Highly valued were the trees dwarfed by natural circumstances and weathered into unusual and sometimes fantastic shapes. Such dwarf trees were collected from all over Japan.
Wonderful old stories tell about men whose work it was to collect these trees. About the harrowing extremes to which they went, often clinging to the sheer walls of cliffs as they claimed dwarf trees growing there. These dearly-got trees were treasured and very expensive.
To this day the bonsai enthusiast prize above all others the tree dwarfed in the wild, perhaps a tiny pine growing in a crack of a granite boulder; a juniper in poor soil, robbed of light by its larger neighbours; or a windswept cypress on a rocky coast-line dwarfed and shaped by severe wind and weather.
What happened, of course, was that as enthusiasm for owning naturally dwarfed trees spread, the trees became more difficult to find. It was only a short step from the situation to the development of artificial dwarfing.
Sophisticated Japenese horticulturists took the next step after that as well, artificially shaping the trees.
Tree shaping went through many incarnations over the centuries before it became what we know today as bonsai. At one period, for instance, the highest goal of the art was to create the most grotesque, bizarre and unnatural shapes imaginable.
In the mid-19th century, today's esthetic principles (based on asymmetrical balance, as in a scalane triangle) took hold. But not until 1909, at in exhibition in London, did bonsai appear in the western world. Since then, interest in the art has increased enormously.
The first seriuos practitioners of bonsai in the United States were Japenese-Americans on the west coast who had brought the art with them from their mother country. These people continue to be invaluable resources for bonsai enthusiasts through-out the country, both because they are long-time masters of the art and because they are living links with the sources of bonsai.
Not that bonsai must cling rigorously to its past, the American chapters in the history and development of bonsai are certain to add new and distinctive marks. For one thing, a broader range of climates exists here, supporting different flora, desert or tropical natives, for instance, of which Japan has none.
Bonsai is practiced widely in the United States, not just on the west coast and by no means only by Japenese-Americans. Servicemen returning from Japan after World War II brought back an enthusiasm for bonsai, as have many of the hundreds of thousands of American tourist who have visited that country in the past 30 years.
Getting started in bonsai isn't difficult or expensive; it's not even time-consuming. And if you find yourself getting swept up by it, you won't have to travel to Japan to find all the resources you'll need to educate yourself and grow in skill and artistry.

Bonsai, The Spirit of Nature- The Hand of Man

To evoke the spirit of nature-that is the essence of bonsai. What place in nature is special to you? A spot under a blossoming cherry tree? A most-carpeted forest? A pine-studded mountain crag? Your own bonsai can take you that place.

The first section of this blog is for inspiration, to give you a feeling of the spirit of nature reflected in the art that is bonsai. The second section gives you the hands in the dirt instruction that will bring that spirit of nature alive for you.

Ficus bonsai

Your first encounter with bonsai (bone-sigh) may startle you. There standing in front of you, is a tree 50, 100, 200 years old, with all the natural dignity and gnarled venerability of its age- and it's only 12 inches tall! You have the fleeting impression of being a Gulliver in Liliput.

Your next feeling may be that you want to try your hand at the art of bonsai. Few who enjoy working with plants can resist bonsai's challenges and rewards. And it's not nearly as difficult as you might expect. All it requires is some basic knowledge of plant growth habits, pruning techniques and plant care. And all you'll need to succed are care and patience. You aren't going to create a beautiful bonsai overnight. But neither will it take you 50 years.
Defined simply, bonsai is a dwarfed tree growing in a tray or a pot. Bon means tray or pot in Japanese. Sai means to plant. So bonsai means literally, "planted in a tray". Leaving it at that, though, is like defining a symphony as a collection of notes played on a collection of instruments. Both statements are true as far as they go, but there is so much more to say.
Like ikebana, the Japenese art of flower arranging, bonsai is considered an art in its home country and among it devotees throughout the world. Does the sound more than a little intimidating? It needn't be. Any pasttime capable of sustaining your interest and enthusiasm for a number of years is going to involve challenges and even difficulties. They're the spice. They make the rewards of success that much more satisfying.
Nobody who's just taken up oil painting expects to paint a masterpiece right away. Nor will the bonsai beginner create perfection at first. But bonsai offers twin opportunities for pleasure. Along with the artistry of it comes the achievement of growing something, not just anything, but a 10 inch high tree that by all rights ought to be 40 or 50 feet tall. You can experience the sheer wonder of watching a maple tree, small enough to hold in your hand, sprout its tiny buds in the spring, fill out with deep green summer foliage, turn bright red in the fall, and drop all its leaves in winter.
Whether or not your bonsai is a horticulturist's Mona Lisa, you can appreciate it deeply. As you become caught up in the hobby, you'll continue to strive for aartistry, refining your techniques to create desired effects. And you'll continue to be delighted at the sight of a mature tree thriving in a shallow conatiner.
(Bonsai. 1979. Lane Publishing)