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.