Welcome to Bonsai Institute

Welcome to Bonsai Institute

Bonsai is 80% horticulture, 10% artistic talent, 10% craftmanship and 1% luck (that makes more than 100% because of rounding errors).
Horticulture, as you see, makes the main part. Healthy and vital trees are the key to effort in styling bonsai.
But horticulture for bonsai is not the same as for regular trees in a normal nursery, made for beeing planted in a garden or parc.
If you look for scientific results on growing trees, you might find a lot of stuff about very young trees in nursery operations or forestry. But nobody cares about trees kept in a small pot for dacades.
Of course there is a lot of knowledge in Japan, there are nurseries specialised on bonsai and special techniques. But these tequniques are only told from the master to his students and maybe they are not always the ideal way, because these techniques are very old and nobody there tries anything new.

In europe, we even have a worse situation. Any knowledge on cultivating trees comes from nurseries. One example:
If you ask the guys working there what kind of fertilizer you should use for a bonsai, they tell you to use only very little fertilizer with very few nitrogen. That's the reason why the special "bonsai-fertilizer" you can buy in garden centers is only a thin mixture that doesn't work proper.
That's because they think a bonsai should stay small and should not grow much.
But that's completely wrong. A bonsai must grow a lot! If you want to make any progress with your trees, they need to grow, so you can cut a lot. That's the only way to enhance the quality of your trees.
So forget about "bonsai-fertilizer", which is much too expensive by the way.

Here in this blog, we will find out how to grow bonsai in a really reasonable way. I know a lot of basics I want to share with you, a lot of research has to be done and so we will approach the science of growing bonsai together.

I studied biology and chemistry for seven years, I am a student to one of the most famous bonsai artists in europe. I know a lot of succesful bonsai artists from germany and europe. I have more than 100 trees in my garden. I collect yamadori in the alps.
Follow me on my way to understand growing trees in small pots, no matter if you prefer the classic japanese way or the naturalistic, european way.