Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Tiny Trees, Big Fun: Lets Talk Bonsai
101 Plays1 year ago
In this special short format episode of Hort Culture, join Josh and Brett as they delve into the delicate art of bonsai. Tune in to discover how patience and careful cultivation can lead to the creation of living sculptures, and perhaps be inspired to start a bonsai journey of your own.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, Hort Culture podcast listeners. We're back with another mini episode and it's again, me and Josh today talking about, we talked in a previous episode about Josh's experiences in Japan. And now we're going to talk about my experiences in Kentucky, but in a Japanese sort of way with the Japanese influenced art form.
Understanding Bonsai: Not Just a Tree
00:00:37
Speaker
Josh, when I say to you, bonsai, what comes to mind?
00:00:43
Speaker
Karate Kid part three, this subplot about him rescuing the bonsai tree from the cliff. Yes. Yes. Many, it lives in many a cultural memory and I think it's a pretty cool, but they're, so they're small trees, right? What? Oh, they are small trees. Uh, bonsai mean like, well, first off, Josh, first off, if I were a purist, which I am not bonsai bone.
00:01:11
Speaker
Psi, like bone, like a bone in your leg or your skeleton or whatever, bone, psi. Okay. Bonsai, that's what they call it. Well, I mean, A, it's like a celebratory yelling kind of thing, but also it's a very funny, you could tell there's some people that really greats on them when people call it that.
00:01:30
Speaker
I'm just happy when anyone even has a remote idea about it or any interest in talking about it at all. But yeah, that is an interesting component. But it roughly translates to a tree in a tray or container. Huh. A literal people. Yes. Yes, bonsai. And so I think a lot of people think that bonsai is a type of tree. And it is not.
00:02:00
Speaker
Right. Okay. In the sense that, uh, you know, a shade tree is not a type of tree. It's a, it's a place where it's grown a way that it's pruned a way that it's treated. So bonsai is a cultivation technique. It's not a species. Okay. Okay. So can any tree then by extension be bone side? Well, is that how you use it too? Do you say bonsai like a verb? I say it like a verb. Okay. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a bit of a maverick though. So I wouldn't go based on me, bad boy, if you will. Um,
00:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, so in general, there are many, many, many species that can be grown as bonsai. So one of the more interesting things in like outside of Japan context is trying native materials in their native environments.
00:02:47
Speaker
Because generally speaking, when people think of a bonsai, what comes to their mind usually is a type of Chinese juniper. So juniperus, chinensis, either the quixu foliage or the, like a procumbens is available in a lot of garden centers. It's the small foliage. But bonsai in general is a technique for keeping the tree small in the first place. Okay. So would you say it's a type of pruning?
00:03:15
Speaker
Well, Josh, it's a whole suite of techniques. And so I would say one of the most important pieces of the process for keeping the tree small is constraining the root system.
Techniques in Bonsai Cultivation
00:03:29
Speaker
Pruning the foliage is important too in a number of ways, but constraining the root system is the way that it allows the branches to grow with shorter internodes. So the leaves are closer together or the needles end up being closer together on the branch and it's not long and leggy.
00:03:43
Speaker
And that ends up producing this thing that looks like a tiny tree, a giant tree in a tiny form. I see. Because they have like the little leaves or they look like. So the process of pruning, the process of doing other kinds of those types of interventions, pruning the roots.
00:04:00
Speaker
ultimately results in a smaller leaf size. So in other words, if you planted, let's say a, what would be a good example, like a beech tree, if you put it in the ground and as it's growing quickly, or even as it's growing in general, if you plant it outside, it's going to have pretty big leaves, you know, half the size of a playing card maybe.
00:04:21
Speaker
If you put it in bonsai cultivation and you do some of the printing techniques that are involved, you can actually have the plant grow smaller leaves over time. Interesting. And the leaves, the internodes, so that's again that space between where the points where new growth comes out, so you know it kind of generates branching eventually.
00:04:38
Speaker
become shorter and shorter and it's all about that process of kind of slowing things down but you can you can attempt to grow just about any species in bones like cultivation and there's a lot of unexplored species or things that have been under explored now there are there are limits to everything it's like a
00:04:59
Speaker
One of the more challenging species, I think, in the United States, at least, is the different oak, different Quercus species. And the reasons for that are, one, they tend to have very large leaves in the first place. And so you can shrink a leaf, but it's like a relative amount. If you start out with a medium-sized leaf, you can get it really small. If you start out with a big leaf, you're just going to get it to a medium size.
00:05:20
Speaker
That's one challenge. The other challenge is it tends to put down this big old taproot as part of its growth habit. It's particularly important for stability and as compared to other species that can tolerate a taproot reduction more. I have some chestnut oaks that I'm trying to grow in that method with this other techniques or whatever.
00:05:45
Speaker
That leads me to a question. Is there a level, like, do you have to start these from seed? Is there a level of maturity that you can start working with to kind of not have to work from seed? Yeah. So the OG, OG bonsai were collected trees and they were collected from environments like the mountain side, where you would go and dig up an ancient tree and put it into a pot.
00:06:13
Speaker
Oh, like it was because of where it was grown, it was restricted to that size. Okay. And so that's an interesting component is that the weather, the availability of nutrition, particularly in water, secondarily, and maybe most importantly, the availability of space and organic material and that stuff for the roots to occupy a space naturally dwarfs the tree.
00:06:36
Speaker
So many of those species that you see that are like these, the classical like really high level bonsai that have a lot of dead, like dead wood that's white and twisted and crazy if like it's a juniper. Those are, those would be ancient trees that grew in a really constrained environment for a really long time. And it was kind of like back in the, back in Japanese instruction period and more like of a guild sort of semi-feudal system.
00:07:02
Speaker
it was like part of a process, like part of a kind of a learning process to go and go up on the mountain, you know, find the tree, bring it back, cultivate it, take care of it, et cetera. And so that's like the origin of a lot of the bone site cultivation was to take this natural thing and put it into a pot in a cultivated environment and keep it alive, style it, do all those things now.
Bonsai Collection and Sizing
00:07:30
Speaker
So since then,
00:07:32
Speaker
The A, that wild material is called Yamadori in Japanese. Yama means mountain. There you go. Dori famously from Finding Nemo. Right, right. Just keep swimming. The Yamadori is just kind of used as this wild collected term. There is a lot of Yamadori, there's a lot of wild collected material collected out of the Rocky Mountains in the United States now, for instance.
00:07:58
Speaker
Generally speaking, a lot of that really high quality material in Japan has already been collected and is gone and or the areas are developed or whatever.
00:08:06
Speaker
So that necessitated, um, so just to be clear, there's still a lot of people who are collecting tree or a decent number of people who are collecting trees and putting them into cultivation. And I would say the highest, most expensive, highest level trees in large part are that are these like wild species that are at the size that they would be. And then of note here, those trees, if they had not grown in that crazy environment, many of them would have been hundreds of feet tall. Right. Right. So they were naturally dwarfed. And so.
00:08:33
Speaker
in the process of doing bonsai, we're trying to kind of, if we're growing something from younger, we have to artificially do it. So to answer your actual original question, a lot of the stuff that I work with, I have grown either from seed or from cuttings. But in general, you're kind of growing it in a weird alternate system like a nursery grower would grow it.
00:08:51
Speaker
bigger container, faster growth in order for the trunk thickness, the trunk caliper to increase, all that kind of stuff. But you're likely putting in some bins and some other things. You're not growing a straight tall perfect tree that's going to sell off of a nursery rack. You're growing something that's a little more interesting, a little bit different, the root composition, et cetera. But yeah, so in general, the idea of
00:09:16
Speaker
you don't want a little tiny seedling to start. Sometimes you have to, it's the cheapest way for sure as far as money goes, but as far as time goes, you would be better off to go and buy and you can buy nursery stock and convert it into a bonsai as well. That's a very common practice. Is there a certain size association with this dwarfing? Like as far as is there beyond a certain size, it's no longer considered bonsai? Like are there boundaries? Interesting question.
00:09:45
Speaker
Yes, in some ways, yes. I think that that tension is always pushed. In bonsai shows, there are categories, and there's sort of like a mame, which is tiny, and then like shouhin, which is a middle, or not a middle size, it's very small. It's like under eight inches tall from the bottom base of the pot.
00:10:06
Speaker
And then it goes up to these other categories and then there's like super jumbo categories too. I would say generally it would be rare to see one that was five or six feet tall from the top of the pot. But there's this whole other art form coming out of China which influenced and kind of
00:10:22
Speaker
there's always the back and forth. There's also this practice of miniature trees from all over Asia and likely all over the world, but there's this more famous one called Penjing out of China, which is generally larger trees than bonsai, but not full size. So it would be like, you know, six or eight feet tall, maybe. Okay. And so I just, this past year I was able to visit
00:10:46
Speaker
the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum in Washington, DC at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC.
00:10:55
Speaker
It is incredible. Their pinching side was closed. I was. What time of the year were you there? Uh, November. Okay. So late fall. Late fall. Hmm. But you know that, that opens up another point that people don't necessarily realize.
Outdoor Cultivation and Seasonal Care
00:11:11
Speaker
They think about these bonsai trees and they think of the little twisted jades and, um, uh, ficuses at the, uh, the Lowe's or the, the home center. Almost all of my trees will spend,
00:11:25
Speaker
the overwhelming majority of their life outside, even through winter, even through summer, they are not houseplants. They don't get brought in. They might get some protection from really, really cold teens, Fahrenheit temperatures. But that might be more just a covering or something?
00:11:42
Speaker
Covering you could consider you know bringing him in if it wasn't you know if it's not too much of a pain But yeah, that's another thing people don't realize necessarily they think of it as these you know kind of house plants, but in reality Most like if you are growing a species in a place Where that species is hardy mm-hmm even growing it as a bonsai it will be hardy in that environment, okay? So it's not babied
00:12:04
Speaker
It's definitely not babied. It might be toddler. You're kind of intervening in a way where you're limiting it. So it's kind of getting a more difficult or robust kind of existence.
00:12:20
Speaker
Yes. I mean, you're managing for pests and stuff like that. It is in cultivation. So in some ways it gets a little bit nicer treatment than it would, a lot nicer treatment than it would in the wild. You're watering it likely every day, but at the same time you are trying to keep it small. And so there is this restraining slowing down of all those processes involved.
00:12:44
Speaker
But overall, you want it to experience dormancy and you want it to experience the cold effects in the way that it would because it's important for the health of the tree overall. Is there a method to... Basically, is it the tray that is doing the bulk of the work and limiting the root potential growth? Or is there a root pruning?
00:13:09
Speaker
Air pruning? What's happening? Yeah, I would say that the handling of the roots is probably the central principle or the central thing that makes bonsai happen. Okay. But it's not the only part of it. It's almost like the trees are sort of like the ingredient prep. I'm sorry, the roots are the ingredient prep part of cooking. You're pulling everything out, you're measuring it, you're getting everything set up, you're getting ready to assemble it.
00:13:35
Speaker
If you do that well, the cooking part is important, but it's way easier. And so in the same way, if you manage those roots and you keep them pruned, yes. So like every two to seven plus years, you're going to take the tree out of the pot. You're going to remove, depending on the species, 50 to 80% of the roots. Wow.
00:13:56
Speaker
put it back into fresh soil either in that same pot or maybe downsize or upsize a pot depending on what the goals are, but it is aggressive. Yeah, that is intense. For like a maple tree or a beach or something that moves a lot of water, it's shocking to see how many roots.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, if the containers the size of like a casserole dish you're gonna put back in like Keep going back to playing cards, but like a root mass. That's the size of like two decks of playing cards Yeah, that is intense because when I went through like an arborism class It was kind of the rule of thumb for this is above ground pruning But you know, there's very much this acknowledge of balance and as above and so below so I wasn't expecting something that big but I
00:14:36
Speaker
The rule of thumb was always, you know, 25% for pruning, uh, no more than that, or I'll just dressing the tree. And if there's like some pressing reason you can go up to like a third, but that you should leave the tree alone for a long time afterwards to recover. So 80%, I mean, it sounds to me like that's how you kill a tree. Yeah.
00:14:59
Speaker
Well, I think it's kind of, the bonsai process in some ways is a controlled stressing of the tree. Because if you look at the responses that it gives, things like short internode length, things like smaller leaves, things like slowed growth, all of those are in a sense, stress responses. Right. Yeah. Because there's the same amount of, it's a much more dense amount of compartmentalization that's still happening. Totally. Yeah. And the other interesting component of that is that,
00:15:27
Speaker
It's not like putting a tree in the ground where it can grow as large as the roots want to, so you're constraining even how far it can get, like how big the root ball can get in the first place, starting from a really heavily trimmed back thing.
00:15:44
Speaker
But the interesting thing is, when I was in DC, I saw a tree, a Japanese white pine, a pineus parviflora, that has been in continuous bonsai cultivation since the 1600s. Good lord. It's been through seven generations of Japanese practitioners until the 1960s.
00:16:06
Speaker
It survived Hiroshima. Wow. And then was given to the United States in the 60s or the 50s or 60s in kind of the post-war period as a very conflicting, for me at least conflicting sign of friendship and yeah, very, very... A reconstruction. Yeah, a fascinating timepiece.
00:16:27
Speaker
In other words, if you can take care of a tree in a bone cycle cultivation, it will likely outlive some of its contemporaries in the world, like out in the world. And it will almost certainly, if you're doing well, it will almost certainly outlive the practitioner taking care of it. It's like having a parrot or something. I think this is gonna live to be 150 years old or a tortoise.
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's intense. I mean, that 400 years for a cultivated tree is like pretty wild, especially for one that's so stressed. It made me that made me think of when I was in Japan, when I went to the island of Fukushima, there were these really large trees and I managed to see a tree there that was 7200 years old. Wow. But yeah, it wasn't being bonsai. It was just protected in a like now it's a UNESCO like World Heritage Site temperate rainforest kind of thing.
00:17:16
Speaker
And I'll say, one of the things that is important to realize or emphasize, I think, is that a lot of the interventions happen at very specific times of year to try and, in the same way that we know about pruning in the spring, or we know about transplanting, if it's going to be really hot, you don't want to transplant.
00:17:38
Speaker
So there are aspects of seasonality to the interventions that allow the tree to not be as stressed or to at least, you know, weather these changes as smoothly as possible. Because like a lot of these trees, you'll see them, like you do a repot and it will just flush out like it normally would. And it looks totally happy. Maybe the leaves are smaller, maybe there's fewer leaves, but it's not like
00:18:01
Speaker
looking chlorotic or like, you know, drooping or shedding branches. That's wild. It's insane. It's very, very cool. And I think one of the things that is important to realize too, is that the process of moving it into a bonsai container or it's like final container, for instance,
00:18:22
Speaker
is gradual in many
Transitioning and Cultivating Bonsai
00:18:23
Speaker
cases. So you're gonna go from like a nursery container or collect it out of the wild or whatever and put it into a recovery box. Then you're gonna take it out and you're gonna move it into a oversized large bonsai container.
00:18:36
Speaker
Okay. Another part of this that I won't go into too deeply because people don't care that much about it, but the soil, the media particles in the bonsai industry, they refer to it as soil, but we all know as hort culture listeners why I reject the premise of media components like pumice and lava being considered soil. Substrate. Yeah, substrate, media.
00:19:01
Speaker
But there's specific types of media that are used in this type of cultivation to try to cultivate small fibrous roots. And so as you transition from a nursery mix, that peat heavy thing that you know for starting your vegetables or buying something from the nursery, as you transition from that into this more aggregate based open structure, less organic material, that's also part of the transition. I see.
00:19:27
Speaker
And you're fertilizing the trees, you're providing that kind of stuff. There's all kinds of stuff about cultivating biology within the container and all that fun stuff. But all that to say, it's not like you take it out of the natural environment, prune all the roots off, and then put it in the pot. That first repot, you might be less severe. And over time, the trees do seem to adapt to that environment.
00:19:51
Speaker
in a way that allows them, like the first repot's gonna be the most restressful, by the time, most stressful, by the time it gets to the 10th repot, it's used to this kind of treatment and regrowth and all that kind of stuff, and it does seem in general that people who've been doing it for that long.
00:20:08
Speaker
see that kind of response. So it's very cool.
Bonsai: Art and Practice Conclusion
00:20:10
Speaker
I think it's, I just want to emphasize, we talk about the horticulture of it, but it's this really very important art form for a lot of people, including me. And I just, yeah, I just like sharing about it and talking about it. I think it's really cool and learning about it. Obviously I've spent a lot of time learning about it, but
00:20:29
Speaker
Yeah, real neat. I mean, they're very enchanting to look at. Yeah, there's something very, very cool about it. But anyway, well, this is another one of our little mini episodes here. Hopefully you enjoyed that little dive into my obsession. Appreciate Josh asking all the right questions. But it's what I do. If you want to check us out on Instagram or get in touch at Hort Culture Pod,
00:20:57
Speaker
If you want to email us, it's hortculturepodcast at l.uky.edu via email. And I'll again do my best Alexis to say, as we grow this podcast, we hope that you'll grow with us. Take care.