How to Start a Bonsai?

To many beginners, the question How to Start a Bonsai becomes very familiar. If that’s also your case, keep reading and you’ll find the answer here.

As a novice, you have several options in choosing starter trees. The first one is pretty easy: just stop by a bonsai stores and buy a fully-trained bonsai tree that you like the most. Then, you have bonsai immediately. But that’s not a smart choice if you want to develop your skills to become an artist, an amateur at least. Buying a fully-grown bonsai just takes away from you the chance to enjoy creating your own works from initial material trees.

Another alternative is getting little young trees, usually from bonsai seedlings sources. Though that choice proves to have some advantages to skilled bonsai fans, it’s not my suggestion for an inexperienced person, because you have to wait too long, even years before you can have a fairly matured tree to practice training skills.

So, you may think about the third option about how to start a bonsai: creating your own bonsai right from the beginning when trees still in pre-bonsai age, which means not too young not too old. By that way, you can start training trees right away without waiting much time.

With third option in mind, let’s …

Get prepared

Before get involved deeply into the training activity, you can do several things:

Reading as much as you can about bonsai, from sources like books, online articles, forums, blogs, etc.

Looking at as many bonsai as you can, even if only bonsai pictures. View bonsai trees in neighbors’ garden, bonsai store, exhibition, etc… See the green of trees, feel roughness of leaves, smell flavor of fresh flowers… do it all by yourself. That way help you connect to real living of plants, and develop the natural passion about bonsai.

Talking with seniors, artists, masters about the topic whenever you can. Ask them simple questions like: how to start a bonsai? Don’t be shy about your junior knowledge. Everything needs the starting point, and you are exactly there. The fastest way to go by that point is to learn as much as you possibly can.

And, if possible, think about such beautiful and attractive plants now and then. The thumb rule of attraction is: the more you think about one thing, the more chance you can get it quicker. Dive into your hobby and you’ll become a bonsai artist, sooner or later.

Do it

Having grasped basic knowledge about your interest, now you need to practice what you’ve learnt. Of course, you can both learn and practice at the same time. To hit the road, just get a tree to start your bonsai journey.

Often, people are too excited about what they love that they are impatient and want to learn everything about the art quickly. That’s impossible. In fact, it usually takes years to acquire all necessary techniques to make a bonsai tree. The good news is you don’t have to do all in one day, or one week. To eat an elephant, we just try one bite at a time. So just do one by one step, and you’ll get there one day.

So far so good, the only thing you need to do now is selecting the right tree to begin. And simply, the answer for the question How to start a bonsai is: get a tree to practice and start enjoying a wonderful and meaningful passion.

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