Happy Bonsai

Demystifies bonsai with step-by-step techniques and care profiles for 40 trees.

Anyone can become a bonsai artist. This book will show you how, through care and display profiles for 40 top trees and fully illustrated demonstrations of more than 20 techniques and bonsai styles. Select the right tree to buy, learn how to keep it thriving year after year, and shape your bonsai into a beautiful living sculpture.

Do you know your shari from your nebari? Can you tell a raft display from a semi-cascade? Do bonsai grow better indoors or out? When is the best time to prune? How do you create that windswept look?

Happy Bonsai has all the answers – and expert tips to boot, such as how, with bonsai, pruning roots is just as important as pruning branches.

Each tree profile provides easy-to-follow growing information, with both day-to-day and seasonal care advice, along with ideas and tips for how to shape and display. Specialist techniques – such as repotting, wire training branches, defoliating, and root and branch pruning – are explained with illustrations for each stage of the process. Techniques are then put into practice with demonstrations of how to achieve the main types of bonsai display, from an informal upright specimen to a forest group or root-over-rock display.

Busting myths and making bonsai accessible to everyone, Happy Bonsai will help you fall in love with this most meditative of garden crafts.

About the Author

Michael Tran has practised bonsai for over 13 years, studying under Udo Fischer, one of the most senior bonsai masters of Europe, as well as several Japanese masters. In 2009 he established the Minoru Bonsai tree nursery near the German town of Heidelberg, where he also teaches bonsai courses for beginners. He is the founder and organiser of the annual Generation Bonsai festival, which brings together top bonsai masters from across the world.