When I first moved to Oregon I went to a famous WPA lodge on the top of Mt. Hood—our nearest active volcano—for some low-stress sightseeing. What I found on the walk around this high-elevation lodge spoke beautifully about how to design multiple-tree bonsai.
These tight groups have several characteristics: 1- Multiple, individual trees. 2- Large ones sprinkled in the middle. 3- More related to each other than to a larger environment or scene.
A very tight clump of fir and hemlock. Being better protected on the inside, the interior trees have the advantage and they translate that into greater biomass.
Mountain Hemlock group. This group is very tall, with shallow tapers.
A close-up gives a better feel for the depth of the group. Small tree off to the left sets off the scale of the larger trees—a great trick for bonsai compositions. Create contrast with trunk size. It sounds obvious, but used well it can make a not-so-large trunk seem huge.
Dead snags mixed in with this group. Note that the dead ones are on the outside. Makes sense, doesn’t it? This is an extreme environment. There are constant winds. Snow feet high. Ice storms. With that as a swirling constant months out of the year, anything on the inside has a better chance of getting through to spring unscathed.
A more open group. This would be an effective planting if done by hand. Notice the negative space between the trunks—and not just trunks, but between groups of trunks. And again the effectiveness of smaller trunks next to larger ones, and how that energizes both sizes.
A view from farther away now gives the sense of open forest: Small clumps of trees dotted over a high slope.
Naturally this leads to the question of what we call these. Tight forests? Groups? Clumps?
Clumps is one of those words we use in bonsai that isn’t well defined. I’ve known many to use “clump” to mean both a multiple-trunked tree, and a small group of trees. Which are two separate things.
From that last image, we might say a group (or clump) related to another group maketh a forest. And a group might be as few as two or three individual trees.