Hi again everyone,
As promised here is the fisrt installment of my book on bonsia.
Creating Your Own Bonsai for Under $20
By: Harold Yearout ©Copyright 2026 Harold Yearout All Rights
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Chaperone: What is bonsai?
Very good question so let’s dive right in and find the
answer that many people do ask and that is what bonsai is.
Bonsai is a type of plant that is most often woody in nature
and can be created from trees and shrubs, most any kind of plant material can
be made into a bonsai. The choice then becomes that of the person interested in
creating their own bonsai.
I do not want to dive into a lot of history here as that can
be boring to a lot of individuals. But suffice it to say at the very least
bonsai can be traced back well over a thousand years and started in the Chinese
culture. Then later in history Japanese monks traveled to Japan and were
introduced to the art of this most enticing horticulture art form by Chinese
Masters.
Since that time, it has evolved though generations of countless
individuals and constant work and creation to be what it is today a most
beautiful and rewarding form of creating tress and other types of plantings to
simply resemble what we would see all around us every day in every part of the
world growing in the ground. The difference here is we as bonsai enthusiasts
try to create the same tree or shrub or other material and grow it in a pot.
Let me tell you a story of how I became interested in
creating bonsai. I was sitting out in my back yard one day having my morning
coffee and I began to look over at my maple tree that I had planted many years ago
in my garden for shade. Then my mind began to wonder what would that same tree
look like growing in a pot?
Well needless to say, that day was when my feet first hit
the ground running to my nearby nursery with the thought in mind to get a maple
and make it into a bonsai.
Now I do not mind telling all of you that I’m sort of a
frugal guy when it comes to wasting my money if there are other ways to make
the same thing happen without spending a lot. So, as I arrived, I began to look
around, and they had several small trees of various types of maples on hand,
but they wanted thirty dollars for one. I thought to myself it is not much and
it is only in plastic pot.
Tall and lanky looking simply because no one had ever pruned
any of these tresses since their start. I wanted to have a plant that would be
more rounded and fuller and not so tall and lanky.
Then there was also soil to be considered and a pot if I
wanted a nice one and not plastic and of course, I had no scissors of shears of
any kind to prune with. So back home I went and back to my think tank and
computer to do more research.
What I found out was that maples are easy to stratify from
seed so at that time it was getting along to about the proper month to go in
search of and collect some maple seed.
Our city has a large community college with many old maple
trees lining the campus paths and walkways, so I began collecting seeds—free is
always a decent price. In about an hour, I gathered enough to grow many maples,
assuming they all sprouted and developed roots.
Admittedly, growing a tree from seed is not the most
practical way to start, but it was how I began. I went through the germination
process and, to my surprise, produced more than a hundred viable seeds that had
sprouted and developed roots.
I carefully transferred the little sprouts to a wooden flat.
I planted them in only sand to start with so they could get just big enough for
me to work with. Sand drains easily and so they would not have wet feet. As a
couple of weeks went by, I had several little maples to start with so I took
one nice one and planted it, I used an old terracotta pot I had laying around
for my pot and some regular potting mix I had from the last year.
The tree grew well and developed into a beautiful specimen.
Over the next few years, I refined it and eventually traded it to another
collector for several bonsai pots.
I have here now a public domain picture of a Maple tree
planted over a rock just to give you an idea of what can be created with time
and patients.
As you can see from the picture, a maple can grow in a pot
and be trained in a format called root over rock which translates to the roots of
this plant growing over a rock and planted in a pot so that the roots also
reach the soil level and take solid root there.
Of course, the same type of tree can be planted in many
styles and trained for decades, if you desired to learn and put forth the
effort required.
In the next chapter, we will explore how to stratify seeds
and grow and train trees from seed, including the materials needed and the
steps involved. Thanks for reading my posts and I hope you can get some thing form this first but short installment of how to create your own bonsai for under twenty dollars.
By: Harold Yearout ©Copyright 2026 Harold Yearout All Rights Reserved
