Visited the Portland Japanese Garden last month and changed my mind about bonsai maintenance

I always thought bonsai was way too fiddly and time consuming for my arborist work. But watching their curator trim a 50 year old juniper with just hand pruners in 10 minutes showed me how precise and efficient it can be. Has anyone here ever tried offering small tree pruning services to local bonsai clubs?

2 comments

2 Comments

margareto2610d ago

and honestly it reminds me of this time I was helping my buddy clean up his dad's overgrown yard and he had this little boxwood that looked like a total mess. I just started snipping away at it with some basic shears and ended up shaping it into this weird little cloud thing by accident. He thought it was hilarious but his mom actually liked it and kept it that way for like two years. bonsai people are a different breed though, they'd probably laugh at my hack job but the whole precision thing makes sense once you see someone who knows what they're doing.

oliverhernandez10d ago

nah you're actually way closer to the real deal than you think. the whole "precision" thing gets overblown online. i've seen actual bonsai masters in japan start with a rough shape and just kinda go for it, they don't plot out every single cut ahead of time. your cloud boxwood thing sounds legit, that's basically just niwaki style which is way more relaxed than the formal bonsai stuff. the only thing i'd gently push back on is that bonsai people would laugh at it - most of them would actually respect that you just went for it and made something cool. half of bonsai is just making accidental shapes work anyway. the real pros spend years fixing their mistakes and calling them "design choices," so your approach is more honest than most.