Why Do You Need To Prune Your Bonsai?

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 pruning is probably one of the most important for achieving this. If you do not prune your tree you will be missing out on a lot of fun, but your tree will also not be making progress and will just look out of control and not a refined bonsai.

Pruning Keeps Your Bonsai Healthy

Probably the biggest reason why we need to prune our bonsai is to keep it healthy.

I know a lot of you are thinking that we don’t need to prune full size trees to keep them healthy …which is true and that is because full size trees are not growing in small pots.

A bonsais growth needs to be kept in balance. The roots and the top of the tree both need to pruned in order to keep things healthy. It’s very easy for the top to grow too aggressively and then the root ball cannot support this as there is just too much foliage and it can’t get the water up into the tree fast enough.

Pruning will remove some foliage, which can take some stress off the demands of the roots, which will keep things balanced and healthy.

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

Pruning Makes The Tree Smaller

The whole point of bonsai is that we have a tree that is small but looks full size. While there are plenty of techniques we can use to do this, but the main one is pruning. It really is the one that does the bulk of the work in keeping our trees small.

You can really see how this is true when you ignore your tree. If you just stop pruning it and leave it alone, it will just keep growing and it will become a full size tree.

Pruning things off the tree will of course keep it small, but pruning can actually encourage the tree to grow smaller too as it can encourage back buds to grow.

These are dormant buds that are found along the branch, usually closer to the trunk. If you prune a branch, these buds can wake up and start to grow too. This now means you have new, smaller growth that is closer to the trunk. You can then cut the branch further until these new shoots are now the outer foliage.

Doing this will keep your tree small for many years and helps us to overcome the problem of the tree wanting to continually grow outwards.

Pruning Also Develops The Shape Of The Tree

Pruning does not only just keep the size of the tree under control, it actually builds the structure.

Every time you prune your bonsai you will be causing it to ramify and look more and more like full size tree with many branches and leaves.

Once you prune a tree it is going to respond by sending out more growth in the area that was pruned. However, it actually reacts by sending out multiple new shoots. These shoots mean we can turn one branch into two, but more importantly, the energy is split between these two branches, meaning the new growth is smaller.

Pruning your tree allows you to turn one branch into two smaller ones. All you have to do is repeat this over and over again and you suddenly end up with a really densely ramified tree that looks amazing and like a really old and established tree that is full size and growing in the wild.  

Pruning Keeps The Shape Of Your Tree

Pruning also allows you to maintain the shape, and stops things from turning into a wild bush.

Bonsai are the shape they are because we styled them this way and if we stopped pruning, they would quickly loose this shape and would turn back into a wild, scruffy mess.

Pruning Is Fun

I think it is also important to remember that pruning your bonsai is fun. I am guessing you got into this hobby partly for the fun of playing around with the trees, not to just to look at them.

While we actually have to prune them for all the above reasons, I think we also have to do it just so we can enjoy ourselves too.

We have to patiently wait for the tree to be ready for pruning, and then we can sit down and enjoy ourselves while we work through every branch and decide what we are going to do.

It can be hard work at times, but I think it is fun and it is certainly rewarding when it grows back and looks even better than it did before.

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

Conclusion

As you can see there are a number of reasons why we need to prune the tree and they are all basically to improve how the tree looks or to keep it healthy.

Pruning really is a fundamental part of bonsai and you cannot avoid it, it really does help us create the trees and helps give them their “bonsai” look. 

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