Growing plants for bonsai tends to assume time in a large training container, or the ground. The goal is to grow a big trunk.
In most cases, this is exactly the right idea. A proportionally larger amount soil grows the large root system that pushes biomass upstairs in trunk girth and big branches.
The goldfish analogy is useful. If you have a 2” goldfish and you put it in a big tank, the fish will grow big. If you keep the 2” goldfish in a tiny bowl, it isn’t going to grow at all. No matter how much food you throw at it (apologies to Dr. Seuss, who was right about everything else).
But once we look at species, there are real differences in those that trunk up well in a bonsai pot.
Here’s a Wisteria in a pot. (A Warren Hill bonsai, incidentally.)
Here the trunk has doubled in a couple decades. It’s always been grown in a pot. The base development is fast even for a deciduous tree, but for a vine it’s extraordinary.
Plants fatten at different rates in pots. Here are some observations:
- in a very small pot, nothing fattens
- once in a bonsai pot, some plant’s trunks will bulk up, others don’t
- Spruce, especially Ezo spruce, seems the least willing to put on trunk size in a proportional bonsai pot, also, Hinoki
- Juniper is famously slow in a small pot
- Black Pine has modest trunk gains in a pot
- Larch is fast
- Wisteria will trunk up in a bonsai pot, which is odd as it is a vine (generally among the most resistant to trunk up)
- Hornbeam and Beech are slow
- Trident is fast to trunk up
- Styrax is about the same as Trident Maple
- Stewartia is slow, half the speed of a Trident Maple
- Atlas cedar is also slow to trunk up
This is all to say that one container size for growing all species of plant may not be optimal, if you are into growing young plants in pots. Once in a bonsai pot, some species do get trunky over time. For others, that caliper rate is glacial.
August 2024 Bulletin
- Tune your cars or book a plane or hovercraft for the Pacific Bonsai Expo in Oakland, CA, October 26-27, 2024, which will be a terrific bonsai party. Hope to see you all there.