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People often wonder what a good shohin or mame bonsai should look like. What sort of size should it be? Does it matter if it is chunky or not? What sort of pot should you get for it?
Well hopefully this video will help you out in making design decisions with your mini bonsai. It gives a wide range of photos relating to shohin size bonsai and a huge amount of styles for you to get inspiration from.
Enjoy.
What shape should you be trying to achieve with your bonsai?
There are basically three different styles of bonsai which you can train your tree into. All of them are fine and none of them are the wrong style. When you style your bonsai you can do it any way you want to, it’s completely up to your own taste. You will find that everybody has different tastes when it comes to them. Because of this there is bound to be some famous bonsai artists whose trees you will dislike! It’s all down to your personal tastes.
1: Fantasy style - This bonsai will look very strange indeed, in fact the stranger the better. They will be very twisty and turny or have leaves/needles much bigger than they should look. This is the most popular type.
2: Well aged style - This bonsai will be made to look very old and replicate a full sized tree. It will most likely be carved to give a ‘lightning struck’ look or be hollowed out. It is a popular style and easy to do with yamadori.
3: Full sized tree style - This one is made to look like a fully sized tree with the branches well spaced and with good taper. The more it looks like a real tree, the better. The leaves should be made small and it will normally need a fairly big sized bonsai to get the style right.
The most popular of these three is probably the first one - ‘the fantasy style’. It is the bonsai you most see in garden centres and is commercially produced quite a lot.
My friend once said to me “I don’t like your bonsai they look like miniature trees”. Which I took as a major compliment because my favorite style is the ‘Full sized tree style’! But it’s all up to your personal preferences.
Heres an example of a well set out bonsai garden. Found on youtube
Today I repotted my oak tree. I put it back in the same pot as before but gave it a little trim. I gave it a new soil mix and covered the soil with grit and fertilizer. I think it could do with going in a ceramic pot now but that will have to wait until next year now.
The person I bought this tree and a few others thought that it was a very clever idea to screw them down to the wooden pot… What a fool. I thought I’d got rid of all the screws but then I found a screw in the root of the tree holding it to the pot!
The stone is there to bend the large root upwards slightly. It was on a strange angle where it was, heading straight across the top of the pot and chopped off at the end.
The tree has been raised slightly in the pot to expose the roots a bit more.
