Ian

Growing your own bonsai from seed is a popular method and is very rewarding, but a lot of people really struggle with it, and this is often because it is their first time do any sort of gardening. The truth is that growing seeds is quite tricky, they can be very delicate, but that does […]

You will often see people prune their bonsai trees super hard, they almost just hack it right back to nothing. I’m sure you’ve seen the videos on YouTube and I’m sure you’ve seen the comments below saying that the tree is now dead and that it won’t grow back and all this sort of stuff

Pruning your bonsai is a fundamental part of the hobby, it is important for a number of reason which I will cover below, but basically you need to do it to keep your tree healthy and to also get it to become a “bonsai”. We have many techniques to help keep our trees small, but

I get a lot of messages from people asking me when they should prune their bonsai and I always feel a bit stupid telling them that they need to do it when its needs done. Sometimes I tell them they need to prune when the tree tells them, which is an equally ridiculous answer, but

When it comes to pruning your bonsai, there is a limit. You can end up pruning your tree too much and it will cause you problems. While the goal of bonsai is to prune your tree, you need to take a balanced approach, balancing the trees health with its progress. It is better to take

You have probably heard people talking about summer or winter pruning of their bonsai and it can be a little unclear what the differences are. They can look similar, but they are actually done for very different reasons. Both types of pruning will be needed over the life of your bonsai and a combination of

If you have just pruned your bonsai, you will probably be wondering how long it will be until it has recovered. Unfortunately it is impossible to say exactly as there are so many different factors that can affect things, which I will go through below, but really after a couple a weeks you should see

Sometimes when you are pruning your bonsai you make mistakes. Sometimes branches you want to keep …get cut off. I can sit here and tell you take your time and think about each cut before you do it, but I know sometimes accidents happen. It’s extremely frustrating when you realise what you have done …but

Knowing how much foliage you should be pruning off your bonsai is important to know. If you take too much off you may weaken your tree and actually kill it, so you really need to know what the limit is so that you can keep your tree healthy and continue its development.  I will go

You will often hear the phrases “Heavy Pruning” and “Light Pruning” in the bonsai world, which can seem pretty strange. Surely pruning is just pruning, how can there be differences? When you hear these two terms it is talking more about the amount of work you are doing. Heavy pruning means you are cutting a