You gain many wonderful experiences from bonsai art. You may choose to
admire and appreciate a thoroughly-trained bonsai. You may also choose to
engage in bonsai art personally by planting seeds or seedlings, or collecting
wild plants, or simply begin with partially-trained bonsai. You will then receive
a lot more.
1. Roots
The roots along with the trunk are fundamental to a bonsai plant. They are
the starting point of making a quality bonsai. In root training, a surface root
structure, called nebari, is important to demonstrating the plant’s natural
beauty. You need to develop a quality nebari. What is more important than a
quality nebari is root pruning, which is intimately involved in the training of
the whole bonsai plant.
Remember it is more convenient to prune the roots during repotting.
2. Trunk
The trunk of a bonsai tree is the most appealing part to create the illusion of
age. Therefore, as a first step, you should start with developing a well-
formed trunk such as good taper (kokejun), initial rise (tachiagari), smooth
curves, etc. The other design elements, including branch location, foliage
distribution, leaf reduction and so on, can be established later on in the
design process.
- Taper (kokejun)
- Initial rise (tachiagari)
3. Wiring
Wiring is a method of bending trunks and branches using wires in order to
achieve various impressive shapes. When the plant is still very young, the
trunk is bent into the basic shape of a tree. Later on, as the plant grows, you
bend the first branch (ichi-no-eda), the second branch (ni-no-eda), the third
branch (san-no-eda), and so on until the final branch that determines the
shape of the bonsai plant. If you cannot achieve the ideal shape with one
wiring, you can do so in stages. By the time you complete the bonsai tree’s
final shape, you can finesse the details of the small branches with wires.
4. Pruning
Once you have completed the work of tapering (kokejun), initial rise
(tachiagari), and wiring, you can begin the final shaping of the plant. Pruning
reduces the volume of the tree in order to achieve the goal of “keisho-sodai”,
literally small size-great similarity. You need to prune the branches, the buds,
and the leaves.
SOURCE: http://www.bonsaiexperience.com/