There is one tree I hate more than any other….

Serissa foetida

What an annoying tree! Notoriously hard to keep alive. It hates it when you move it, water it, don’t water it, don’t feed it enough or breathe on it.  Whats more if you try to repot it, you get a disgusting odour from the roots.  Foetida literally translates as ‘foul smellling’.

I’ve got two at home that I’m managing to sustain.  I would offer them for sale but I’d feel sorry for the person that I sold them to.  My advice is just don’t buy one.

There are a couple of ones that are sometimes offered as bonsai that I personally hate for various reasons.

1. Chinese elm – It’s just so common and commercialized. Any that you find in the shops are so unnatural looking.
2. Horse chestnut – Why would you?
3. Sageretia theezans – I’ve had a few die on me, they seem quite hard to keep.

1. Leaves are made up of lots of leavelets which can make it look bare in the winter if you do not have enough branches
2. Because of the large leaves it needs to be made into quite a large tree
3. Leaves appear very late in the year, they are one of the last trees to come into leaf

Here is a picture of a fully grown tree at the golf course I work which shows how a bonsai could look. It’s a little hard to see the outline of it because everything is so green there at the moment but you can see it is a grand tree indeed. Ash trees are as hardy as old boots. You can do anything to them and they will just keep on growing. I am growing a yamadori ash at the moment which I am giving updates of on this site.

The Common Ash

The Sycamore

The (mighty!) English Oak

I get a plentiful supply of seedlings growing out of my lawn and flowerbeds which I can use as bonsai. The only problem is, because these tree’s leaves are so big the bonsai need to be big also. However you can get a great result out of using these. You just need to think a little bit bigger when creating your bonsai. Leave it grow for a good few years on it’s own before trying to train it. You’ll find you can end up with something spectacular with any one of these three trees. It will just take a bit of extra effort.

Give it a try. Create an ash, sycamore or oak bonsai today! As a general rule they should be more than two foot tall to look sensible.

1. Hawthorn/Blackthorn

• Small leaves
• Trees readily wrap around each other if making a multi-trunk bonsai
• Great looking bark when aged
• Pretty white flowers in spring
• Hardy

2. Juniper

• The old classic tree
• Needles very small
• Hardy
• Evergreen so looks good all year round

Juniper is quite a large generalisation but my favorite one to use is juniperus x media “old gold”. Most people like to use “shimpaku”.

3. Japanese maple

• Fantastic colours and leaf shape
• Readily grows as a bonsai as it likes being small
• Hardly any wiring needed as grows its own interesting shapes

Again, japanese maple covers a lot of different types. My personal favorite is Acer Palmatum “deshojo” for its deep red colour.

4. Cherry tree “kojo no mai”

• Lovely small white flowers in early spring followed by small leaves
• Perfect as a small tree
• Very attractive

5. Fig

• If you have an indoor tree its got to be a ficus, loves being indoors
• Interesting roots and aerial roots

6. Oak

• Despite an oak having big leaves I still think it should be in the list
• The oak is Britains favorite tree
• It really it fabulous looking and if you grow it quite large (over 2 foot) the leaves are not noticably big

7. Berberis

• Atractive little shrub with round red leaves
• Naturally grows small so easy to control
• Very interesting aged bark

8. Privet (ligustrum)

• Easy to maintain and look after
• Easy to find subjects in old hedges
• Evergreen

9. Larch

• A deciduous needled tree, the new needles in spring are unlike anything else
• Easy to care for
• Bark and trunk quite aged and substantial early in life

10. Chinese Elm

• Small leaves
• Very popular choice
• Easy to look after

I was going to leave out the chinese elm as they are so common and I like my bonsai to be completely unique. However they are a very good choice for bonsai so had to be included.

The following trees are even harder to make into bonsai because their leaves are compound instead of singular. This means that a leaf is made up of more than one leavelet instead of just the one. This is not good news in winter when they drop off and you have no branch structure left.

These include:

Horse chestnut

Ash

Rowan

The method to get around this is to have a very large bonsai. It’s as simple as that. However you will still notice a very large reduction in branch structure in winter (or at least what you thought was branches).

Part one here

The first and most obvious reason a tree is harder to create a bonsai with is large leaves.

These include:

Horse chestnut

Sycamore

Oak

Having said this oak is one of my favorite trees to use as bonsai. So the fact that they are hard to use as bonsai should not put you off, you just need to put more effort in. Large leaves can adapt and therefore they will get smaller over time. You can encourage them by plucking off the large leaves and leaving the small ones. This will “teach” the tree that small leaves are good and big leaves are bad! Make sure it has a lot of spare leaves when you do this though.

Part two here

On Saturday I decided it was time to style the box tree and place it in a pot. Mainly to do with having not much else to do but also because it was looking ready for styling.

Here it is in the growing bed before the repot. I’ve put the flash on so that you can see the branch structure better -

Here is the angle from the back in the growing bed of the box tree -

I uprooted the tree and gave the roots a soaking under the tap followed by a vigorous trim. It was fitted into it’s small new pot and new soil mix was added making sure all the gaps around the roots were filled. I added some moss around the base of the trunk for effect and watered again.
After that was the simple process of trimming a lot of excess branches off to give a pleasing look to it. Finally I fully wired the tree into a more twisted position until I found it perfect. Here is the result -

Total time to create: about 45 minutes