Page 54 - Tài liệu cây cảnh Bonsai4me Bonsai Basics

vigorous tree (such as a Chinese Elm) to months for the root pruning of a weaker

species or even years for trees that have been collected from the wild.
Learning how much time a tree needs in order to recover from work is
difficult to generalise and comes largely with experience but is ideally learnt by
studying the reaction of the tree to work and knowing when a tree is growing
with renewed vigour.
A good general indicator of renewed vigour and recovery in many trees is
the appearance of new shoot growth (extension) and successful hardening off of
these shoots. Note that new buds and new leaves on their own are not indicative
that a tree has or will recover from work that has been carried out.
Patience
A healthy nursery tree is bought during the summer and you style it

immediately. Pleased with your efforts, you are unable to resist the temptation to
plant it straight into a bonsai pot even though it is late Summer and your timing
is wildly wrong.
The result is a tree that is too weak to respond to your styling and fails to
grow for the remainder of the Summer and early Autumn, though luckily for
you, it doesn't die.
The following Spring the tree starts growing, but a few branches have died
back during the Winter, your styling is wrecked and the tree is still too weak to
put out any new shoots. A year later, your lack of patience has resulted in a
bonsai that may take another season before it actually recovers from all of your
work.
With a little patience, your newly styled tree could have been allowed to
recover and have been repotted just 6 months later, at the correct time, during the

following Spring. This tree will have been given recuperative time after styling
and repotted at its correct cyclic time. The resulting bonsai would be vigorous,
suffer no dieback and be ready for further wiring and trimming within a few
months. Most importantly it would be much better developed than the tree that
had the ill-timed repot.
Patience is the hardest part of learning to use correct timing practises to your
advantage. The temptation to plant your newly styled tree into it's first bonsai pot
can be difficult to resist. However, with experience you learn that by obeying the
rules of timing, the progress and development of your trees will always faster.