How Much Foliage Should Your Prune From Your Bonsai?

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 through some things you need to know about or consider to make sure you are pruning the correct amount.

How Much Foliage You Remove Depends On The Species

Before you decide how much foliage you want to remove, you need to actually know how much work your tree can handle.

Some species can handle a lot more foliage removal than others and how they react to this can also be different.

Take the time to learn about the species you have and check how much it can take as you don’t want to do a lot of work to only realise afterwards that you have severely weakened your tree and set it back …or even worse killed your tree.

(You can read more about – How Can You Tell If Your Bonsai Tree Needs Pruned?)

What Are You Trying To Achieve?

When you are thinking about doing something like removing some foliage, you need to ask yourself what it is you are trying to achieve by doing this.

Asking this is going to help you work out how much foliage you should be removing.

If you are building the foundation of the tree, then you may want to leave it alone and just let it grow, but then again, maybe it has reached the size that you want, so at this point you would want to prune it back hard and remove a lot.

The only way you are going to know this, is if you know what you are trying to achieve. You can literally then say yes, or no when you ask yourself if the tree has achieved what you want …which makes deciding how much you should remove pretty easy.

The same goes for when you are trying to refine the tree. If you know you are trying to achieve smaller growth and slow the speed of the tree down …then you will know that pruning more is going to get this result, rather than just giving it a light pruning.  

I have said this many times before on this site. You always need to know Why you are doing something and What it will result it. If you can answer these two questions you will end up doing the right amount of work on your bonsai to allow it to make progress.

Can Your Tree Handle What You Are Planning To Do

You also need to make sure that your tree can actually handle what you are planning to do.

This will go back to species, but it will mainly depend on the health of the individual tree. You want to make sure that your tree is healthy enough to be able to handle the work you are about to do. 

What Time Of The Year Is It?

You also need to take into consideration the time of year, as this can effect things, mainly the trees ability to recover.

Every time you prune a tree it is going to weaken it and it will be forced to try and recover from this. If you are doing this at the wrong time of year then it can be extremely detrimental to the tree.

You ideally want to make sure that there is plenty of growing season ahead so that the tree can actually grow, recover and replenish itself.

You don’t want to end up in a situation where there is frost on the way soon after you have pruned, as any new growth that is starting to show is going to get damaged by the cold and this is only going to weaken the tree further and you could end up killing the tree if you get this wrong.  

(You can read more about – Frequently Asked Questions About – Pruning Your Bonsai)

Remember To Balance Things Across The Tree

 A lot of foliage removal is about balancing the energy across the tree. This is important as you don’t want to remove too much from one area, weakening this area, and then leaving another area totally alone, causing it to now be too strong.

You may find that the tree just hedges its bets and starts sending more energy to the stronger area and actually ignores the weaker areas, basically allowing it to die back.

A good way to look at this is if you imagine a tree with 3 equal branches, you wouldn’t just remove all the foliage off one and leave the other two, it would be very unbalanced.

The only time you would want to do anything like this, is if one branch is going crazy and it is clearly taking most of the energy already. By just removing foliage form this area, it may allow the weaker areas to catch up, so actually what you are doing… is balancing the energy out. 

(You can read more about – How To Prune A Bonsai Tree – A Beginners Guide)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you have a better understanding of how much foliage you should be removing form your tree. Each tree will be different and even each pruning session will differ too, but so long as you try and keep things balanced and your tree is healthy enough and capable of handling the work you are doing, then it shouldn’t be a problem.

Always remember that you don’t need to do everything in one day. You can always come back at another point in time and do a little more.

(You can read more about – How Often Should You Prune A Bonsai?)