What is bonsai?

Bonsai (盆栽) is a Japanese word — “bon”, a small pot, and “sai”, a plant (a plant grown in a small container). Bonsai is the Japanese art of growing miniature trees using special techniques. These techniques keep the tree small and give it the look of a natural, fully formed, mature tree.

Bonsai is not just gardening. Working on a bonsai demands a great deal of attention, time, knowledge of its care and, above all, patience, because to achieve a fully formed, beautiful tree three or four years is not enough. With proper care, a bonsai can live for more than a century. But the tree’s actual age is not what matters most. What matters in bonsai culture is the tree’s unique, striking character, expressed in its natural, well-proportioned form. Every detail of the little tree should be natural, and there should be no sign that its shape was created by human hands. Work on a bonsai is never finished. It needs attention and care throughout its whole life.

“A bonsai is a living sculpture, nature idealized in miniature” — that is how one expert has described bonsai.

There is a great deal of misinformation about bonsai, which in itself gets in the way of understanding and appreciating it properly.

1) A bonsai is not a genetically dwarf plant that never grows large. A bonsai is an ordinary tree or shrub (maple, pine, cherry, linden, spruce) that is kept small through special care and has the same beautiful, natural form as its large “cousins” growing in nature.

2) In the process of working on a bonsai — its so-called “dwarfing” — no harsh or crude methods are used to “make the tree small”. These methods are well known to anyone who has had even a little to do with gardening.

3) Some people think that the smaller a bonsai is, the more it is worth. A bonsai doesn’t have to be just a few centimeters tall. In fact, a classical bonsai is considered to be a tree between 5 and 130 centimeters tall, and its aesthetic value is never judged by size alone.

4) A bonsai is not a houseplant. It should be outdoors all year round, and only on special occasions, for a few days, can it be brought inside to decorate a room.

Creating bonsai can be considered a passion, but it is probably more than just a hobby or a way to pass the time. For the enthusiast, bonsai is a way of life: calm, composure, attentiveness, patience — these are the qualities essential for anyone who wants to grow a truly beautiful tree.

What matters most in creating a bonsai is a beautiful form: the trunk, the arrangement of the branches and surface roots; leaves, flowers and fruit in proportion to the miniature tree; and, most important of all, a bonsai with a “finished” look should be naturally refined.

In most cases 2 or 3 years is not enough to bring a small young plant to “perfection”, which is why attention and patience are the qualities anyone needs if they seriously decide to work on creating bonsai.

Growing a bonsai yourself brings great pleasure, far more than buying a ready-made specimen and looking after it. At first not everything will turn out the way you planned. Everything takes experience, and building experience takes time and work done with passion. No beginner working on bonsai is safe from failures, large or small. Every great expert has had such setbacks in their time. So if you want to achieve real success, even several failed attempts should not be a reason to give up on creating bonsai.