The creation of small shohin bonsai

I have been creating and enjoying bonsai for many years now but I have always hated the word miniature when referring to bonsai. Bonsai in my opinion are not miniatures.

There is one type of bonsai however that is very small and that is the shohin and in Japan the word shohin means tiny thing.

When someone looks at a regular bonsai planted in a pot and thinks that it is miniature or small or dwarfed then they may be right to a degree. However the art and idea of bonsai has been based upon a sound principal of horticulture and creative art for hundreds of years.

And although the viewer sees the bonsai as miniature or dwarfed the plants are really only creations that have been styled and trained by there owners to resemble the same exact type of tree that you might see in any forest any where around the world.

The one real difference is that the bonsai has been trained to live in the smaller confines of a pot or tray by the way the owner has clipped, trimmed, wired and trained not only the trunk and branches but also the entire root system of his or her tree.

Now let’s take into account the shohin bonsai and its size. If you thought that a regular bonsai was small or miniaturized then you would really be shocked if you were to see a shohin bonsai.

Because the art of shohin is that of creating a bonsai that is no more than ten inches tall over all from the base of the pot to the top of the tree.

Not only that but the entire tree and pot should easily fit into the palm of the hand and that my friend is small. And believe it or not I have seen bonsai that were so small that they could fit into a sewing thimble.

Some of the main differences between the shohin and regular bonsai are of course the size and shohin are very small in compression but just as fun to create and as nice and lovely to look at.

If you want to create and grow a shohin you will need to take its size into account in many ways. Most noticeably would be watering, feeding, location, temperature, pot size and of course the material and plant size you want to work into a shohin.

Watering is always the most critical because the plant is in a much smaller pot and has les dirt to support the root system and therefore will dry out much faster. And it should be rather obvious that you would feed this size plant less than a larger plant.



If you plan to place your finished shohin in your garden then you would certainly want to protect it from the direct sun and also keep it where it will not be blown over or off of a display bench from high winds.

The selection of material for a shohin bonsai can be nearly any woody material just like its big brothers and you could simply start looking for a nice plant in a nursery or collect one from the wild or of course grow one from seed.

The later of course taking you many years to develop the size of trunk that you would want for a nice visual affect when viewing your shohin. I would much rather start out with a plant that all ready has some girth to the trunk and simply work it down in size to fit into a tiny pot.

You can always add some moss or other material to the top of your pot to help not only create more humidity for your tiny plant but also create a more pleasant planting to view.

You can still follow the regular rules of bonsai for your shohin and by that I mean the styles need not be different nor do the pots or the soil and you will still trim, clip, cut, wire, and do all same things to these little plants as you do with your larger ones.

It would take much more room and a lot more extensive study about the art of shohin than I have room here to tell you about. So if your at all interested in this bonsai art form then you will need to look for more material here on the World Wide Web.

Simply do a search for shohin bonsai and you will find many sites, articles and books that will explain in depth what you will want to learn about this type of bonsai planting.

If your at all interested in creating some bonsai of your very own but are a little confused about how and where to start then I recommend reading and studying first that way you will have a better understanding of the whole process when you do decide to begin.

Here is a great book that I highly recommend when starting out in the wonderful hobby of bonsai. Once you have read this book there are others that I can recommend as well that will teach you even more about this most rewarding of all horticulture art forms.



By: Harold Yearout
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