Creating a maple bonsai tree in 20 mins EASY!

Japanese maples are one of the most popular deciduous species of trees for making into bonsai they are popular because they have beautiful leaf color leaf shape and you get many different varieties the different varieties of maples are so diverse that you can get some that start of green in the spring and then they turn red as the Sun shines of it is like the Sun Tan that you get on your body so they've maples also turn a nice color you see the insides are green where it doesn't get the Sun and the outside is bright red where the Sun turns the carbohydrates into sugar in the leaves most of the vapors are are popularly soared are about this size and maybe smaller but the large bonsai are what we call the show specimens which are used for exhibitions and the like the value of a maple depends very much on its quality and it depends on the shape of the tree the ramification of the trickiness of the branches and also the base of the tree this particularly maple is a very valuable one because of the surface roots the Japanese have a term for the base of the tree they call it the nebari it simply means the root base as you can see it is huge spreading and really thick sometimes is also called the Turtleback style of growing the roots so it is a massive spread of roots here which have fused together this tree would be at least 60 to 70 years old and was imported from Japan and it commands quite a high value this is an example of an Audrey Mountain maple a straight a subpar meat on which the Japanese referred to as Yama Momiji meaning Mountain maple this has been grown on a rock and the roots have spread so much that it has almost completely covered the rock on which it was originally grown another example of a very very good quality tree and also an expensive tree this is an example of a Mountain maple or straight a selamat that we grow in our field for several years to thicken the trunk and once the trunk was thick enough we dug it out out of the ground and started growing the branches again but can you see the thickness of the trunk and the beautiful roots so this tree has still quite a few years to go before it becomes a good specimen the making of a bonsai does involve a lot of time although you can make a bonsai very quickly the refinement and quality does involve a long time skill I'm showing you this particular maple it's a Bonita Dori which we earlier many years ago maybe about ten or fifteen years ago and then it was grown in the ground for many years to thicken the trunk and in the last three years we grew them in these shallow trays so the roots can start spreading and I let everything go so it looks like a wild shrub or bush but inside there there is a very beautiful bonsai and I'm going to show you how we will refine the stream now that it has got a nice shape nice taper and a reasonable quality of trunk we will now start refining the tree so that it reaches the final stages of bonsai as you can see there are lots of weeds going here but it doesn't matter it tree is growing healthily and strong we are not producing an exhibition tree at this particular moment but we are just letting the tree grow strong to get good quality branches that we can train and use for the final shaping of the tree I will just explain that this long branch here is called a sacrificial branch this branch will not be used in the final scheme of the bonsai it is kept there so that it feeds into the trunk and makes this portion of the trunk thick eventually this trunk will be cut off and removed even these little tricks here are kept here only to thicken the trunk but they will not be used in the final bonsai so you've got to disregard this although it is growing it would be not part of the final scheme of bonsai so the first branch of the bonsais will actually start from about here what I will do to give you a better impression of the tree is to cut it roughly into a triangular shape when you make a bonds off any variety of species the best thing to do in try to design of shape the tree is to aim for the triangular shape I will just show you very quickly in literally a matter of minute or less simply by trimming the tree into this triangular shape it will begin to look like the finished article so as you can see all I've done is to trim it into a conical shape and just by doing that you will see that it is beginning to resemble the finished bon life what I need to do next is going to the tree and start selecting the branches that will be used eventually in the design of the tree sometimes instead of using very thick wire to when Bend these branches down I want to get this branch out of the way you can also simply tie some guy wires and pull the whole branch down so you won't have to use very thick wire to do the bending and that will achieve the same purpose can you see just by putting a guide wire I've taken it down so you can gradually take it down lower and lower so that is one form of wiring but these ones are will wire in the conventional way many people do not like to wire maples because they don't like to leave scars on the branches but provided you remove the wires in good time then it isn't a problem we always wire two branches together using a single piece of wire this is what we call the two branch principle the two branch principle is almost universal in all wiring that you do in one side so one branch acts as the anchor for the other one now remember that this tree is only being trained it is not the final wiring for making the bonsai and I'm still keeping a lot of foliage there because the foliage and the growth is going to strengthen these branches and make the branches thick this variety of maple is the Benicia Dori it's a red maple but the red is more like a pink rather than a deep red it's very similar to this show Joe but in my view it is a far superior tree if they showed you because it's more vigorous tree with maples when we wire the branches we are not that concerned about getting the branches to hang downwards as in the case of a point because maples are very delicate trees and the branches should spring upwards a little bit so it's not very important to get them hanging down as long as it leaves spaces between the different layers you so I've wired some of these branches so that I can layer the trees so that you can see through the branches so this has been wired now this has been wired down so there's now space between the different layers of branches and you can see the beautiful trunk with the bonsai the trunk is by far the most important aspect of the bonsai so when you can see the beautiful trunk line that that makes the bonsai more impressive so we've kept the front open and the branches are placed in such a way that there are gaps and spaces between the branches so this is the work that I've done in about five or ten minutes and you can see that this tree is well on its way to becoming refined and as I said this is only a sacrificial branch to thicken the base but it is still quite a nice branch to have in the final design so whoever buys this tree may still want to keep that so that's an option for the future and as you can see this is the amount of branches that we will remove we've removed about half the foliage and half the unwanted branches so in bond-athon you've got to be prepared to cut the branches and to be able to shape the tree by cutting if you are not prepared to cut the branches then it will be difficult to create a good bond zone I can now plant it in a bigger pot to invigorate the tree a little more but it's not quite ready to put in a final bonsai pot just yet so this is how we work on maples there are cups here and we can put cut paste on this to seal it off so you can use it in paste here is the map one thing then I'm just yet not so this is cut paste that we use for sealing the wounds you need the cup base to be fairly soft usually easier to use in the summer or room temperature but in cold weather it's been difficult but using cut base you encourage the wounds to heal quick and it calluses easier it also prevents disease getting into the tree there you are this is the finished wreath at this point in time

Channel: Herons Bonsai

Views: 2,069,438

Rating: 4.9019575 out of 5

Keywords: bonsai, bonsai tree, bonsai trees, how to bonsai, how bonsai, make bonsai, grow bonsai, how to bonsai tree, make bonsai tree, bonsai help

Id: anyWlUK6E-k

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/barden1069]

Dat framerate

[u/jomiran]

I didn't know I wanted this.

[u/Puuhinen]

Oh shit, I just noticed I misspelled his name :(