Here in the UK we don’t like to wait for long. Don’t get me wrong, we seem to love queuing up in shops for as long as it takes. It doesn’t matter to us if we wait in the post office line for half an hour as long as we get there in the end. But for some reason we hate to wait for anything else here in Britain. Thats just the British way. If you don’t notice there’s a green light at the traffic lights you just know that someone is going to beep his/her horn at you within 2 seconds.
The same can be said with our attitude towards bonsai. This ancient Japanese art form just seems too slow for todays society. We need good trees and we need them now. I’m sure it must have been a western invention to collect trees from the wild which are ‘already done’. The idea of growing a fantastic old bonsai from seed is a great idea… Until you realise how long it’s going to take.
Some bright spark one day decided that it might be pretty great if you could just cut a tree down to a stump and let it grow from that size on. It’s a great idea and sometimes does work quite well, but you are still faced with quite a few problems when it comes to an instant bonsai from a stump.
For a start it still takes a large amount of time. First of all if it survives the mass of roots you chop off, you need to place it in a growing bed and not a pot to recover. You then have to cut it down to the required size and then wait for a few years for it to grow branches again. After that you need to carve a considerable amount of wood out of it to make it look half sensible.
If all the above goes well after 5 years or so it might be looking half reasonable.
All of these reasons are why I hate stumps and think they should be left growing where they are into full size trees. It’s fair enough if you find a small tree which has been stunted by nature and can be trained easily. So let’s stick with sensible and natural looking yamadori and leave the stumps well alone! If you think you have to chop off some major parts leaving it looking a bit silly, leave it growing where it is.
