Making Bonsais is easier than most people think. After your Willow Roots, Plant it either in the ground or in a large pot. If you plant it in the ground, it will grow faster and the trunk thicker. It is a process that, if done right, will take you a few years to get something that looks like a bonsai. Don't expect a show specimen in 6 months. Keep your bonsai in the ground and let it get as tall as you'd like your bonsai. Then cut off the top and allow it to "back branch". This is the sending out of new branches from the older buds, preferably from those near the top for your tree. Then let those branches grow only as long as you'd like them... usually just short of the ground. Get yourself some Copper Bonsai wire. It can be ordered online. You'll need some thin wire for the thin branches of the willow. You'll need to check some sites on "wiring" to see how to do it correctly. You dont' want to cut into the branches soft bark. Wrap it around in a spiral fasion from the trunk to the tip. Bend the branches the way you'd like them to fall... As close to a natural looking Old tree. Check them every few months make sure the branches are not being cut by the wires. Remove and rewire if they are. Every 3-6 months I would take a shovel/spade and cut a ring around the tree about the diameter of a bonsai pot you'd like to see your tree in, then slide the spade a few inches (about 4-6 inches) under the tree. This is to cut and trim the roots to the length needed for a pot in the future. Do not lift the tree! Just leave it there. It will recover much faster this way. After a few years of training like this, (and you can show people your tree in it's spot!) You can eventually move it to a bonsai pot of your liking. By this time, your tree should have a nice sized trunk and a good shape, if you kept up on your wiring and branch pruning. If you'd like a short cut to a good bonsai.. .a great place to find good material is a long the edge of a field visited by deer or that keeps sheep, goats, cows etc. They'll have kept the trees short by grazing and they'll already have thick trunks.

Gandalf, You missed the point. What I am geting at is to be true to the spirit of bonsai a progression is needed BEYOND thanking the Japanese/Chinese for their cultural "gift" to us. If we are to really practice bonsai, as the Japanese do, we have to stop the "hero" worship and get on with it. Of course the Japanese (Chinese, Koreans, South Asians, etc.) are due credit and honor for developing bonsai. The cultural debt is a deep one. However, retaining "the Japanese do it better" inferiority complex won't help us in the least. Bonsai is a dying art in its homeland(s). It's known as an old man's passtime in Japan by and large. The cultural revolution in China pretty much squelched it there. Things are changing in both places. The market for bad mass produced mallsai in Japan is a fast growing one--so much for tradition. China is struggling to emerge as a world power and is struggling with traditions as well. Bonsai's primary driver in the coming decades will be the West and I'm not being an insensitive cultural barbarian. This thought isn't mine. It's been voiced by more than a few Chinese and Japanese bonsai people. Check out this thought in books like Wee Yu Sun's Artistic Potted Plants, or in the statements of more than a couple of Japanese artists over the last few decades. "The term "Americanization" comes to mind. Cultures/peoples/countries across the world resent the fact that their younger counterparts give up on or quit practicing the old beliefs and adopt a "Western" attitude, just so they can be chic or fit in in the popularized way the "Modern/Western" world is." And please stop with the "big bad America" rap. It's quite a tiresome, lazy argument and doesn't apply to Japan in the least. Japan has long been in the "first world" and on the cutting edge of modern technology for quite some time. That's pretty apparent to anyone with a television or a computer. However, in becoming that modern economic power, the Japanese are losing alot of traditions. The country is undergoing a tremendous population shift and dropping traditions right and left. Bonsai is one of those arts. What I am arguing is not to be trapped into thinking that we in the West have nothing to offer bonsai. We do. In fact, we may become its principle repository as Japan's culture continues to change. For what it's worth, you might do some more detailed research on the history of bonsai. The long 1,300 year history you've cited is misleading. There is a huge difference in what was done in China a millenium ago and what the Japanese are doing now. The Chinese collected trees and plunked them into containers without altering them. A majority of the meticulously groomed award winning Japanese bonsai that one sees now in shows and in books have been bonsai for only a short 100 years or less--which is the rough time frame in which bonsai took firm root as a popular passtime in Japan. The gulf between the original Chinese animism, tree spirit container plant and the primped, wire-groomed, power tool-carved Japanese bonsai today is a pretty huge one. I think there may be a thesis in how modern power tools and modern manufacturing capabilities (wire, tools, etc) have dramatically influenced the advancement of bonsai...

Hi, well bonsai literally means 'tree in a pot', though as Josh said one can train a tree in the ground to some extent, but it's not a bonsai (have you never seen the original Karate Kid movie? So many people got turned on by the bonsai being taken care of by the sensei (teacher), though all it really showed was him doing a little trimming. There are many ways to grow a tree so it can live in a pot for a very long time, but it takes time to learn the techniques and just how to keep the trees alive for any length of time because each species has different needs, the majority of them have to live outdoors for life (though not in the ground except for a few years initially to speed up trunk thickening) to be able to go through cold dormancy in the winter. That applies, of course, to most of us in climate zones where they grow naturally. However, tropicals can be grown indoors, though most often with the help of supplementary lighting, special set-ups for humidification (a spray a day does nothing for any plant) and very careful attention to watering correctly. Bonsai cannot be grown in the same way as house plants... plop in a pot, water weekly and trim on occasion - they won't survive very long at all without knowledgable care. A misconception people often have is that the trees are special type called 'bonsai', but in fact they're just regular trees that are grown and trained to look interesting and (usually) old, which is why fat trunks are important to most styles (though not all), but rather than waiting decades for them to be large, you'd take a 3-5 (or often more) year old tree with a decent trunk and then 'chop' it back to be very short, grow new smaller branches, and have the illusion of an ancient tree! There are schools of thought that more closely follow traditional Japanese styles, which are quite formal, and others (not as many) that like the Chinese 'penjing' which tend to be more landscape creations (large interesting rock in a shallow tray with tiny pines hanging off the sides, and maybe a tiny figure of a fisherman (called 'mudmen') or whooping crane down below. Bonsai actually originated in China thousands of years ago. Today, especially in the west (Europe included) many people are growing in more naturalistic styles, still training their trees, but not in such formalized styles that follow some rather rigid rules. People also often say that bonsai are 'tortured' to become what they are, but in fact it's nonsense because they get treated like royalty in all respects (when done right :-) and easily outlive their in-ground relatives by many years if things are done right. You will see scads of what we call mall-sai in places like Wal-Mart, etc., tons of Chinese elms and Junipers (really just 3-5 yr old cuttings) stuffed into tiny pots (we only do that once they're developed into bonsai, but no one told the people selling them by the gazillion - imported from China and all trained in the same unnatural "s" shape or similar styles) and they all have the same utterly useless and often worse 'care tags' on them... please ignore as you don't want to end up with those, at least not until you know what you're doing and choose to do it because they're cheap. Good bonsai (some are 3-4' high and as wide across, though most are smaller, and some truly tiny) are grown from (mostly) nursery stock, cheap but healthy and more developed. I also strongly suggest you do a lot of reading before running out to buy anything because even a week in 'ignorant' hands (nothing personal :-) can be the end of a tree. Online places to read basics are bonsai4me.com, evergreengardenworks.com (mostly for conifers) and bonsaihunk.us/cultural.html for tropicals. On the website Bonsaisite.com there's a subforum of book reviews which is also a good place to start, and the best place of all to learn - because you see how things are done first hand and terms (which in books can be confusing) explained. You don't really want to hear more right now do you? I get a bit carried away sometimes!

You've posted one of those post where the questions are many and require you to make an effort into reading other postings from topics referencing Jades Watering is one subject you asked In response you could read YES you could water once a week in another response you may hear once every month My response : What is the soil composed of ? Your cultivating practices will be known before the end result you've shown My response for the final end result you want is more questions : How long will it take: Aummm 5- 8 years ?5- 8 Decades ? Depends on your cultivating practices. New plants with nice results and ideas can be overly exiting for it's new owner help us help you break your questions down into topics Develop good cultivating practices by reading more on yours topic here at GW or other places as most of your questions have several responses on this very forum. Leaf propagating: A subject of it's own will be good to see follow up from you on this on it's own thread. Guessing if you apply the effort for them to root 4 - 6 weeks some of them may show root as the others could take longer Not certain if you'll have 100 % successes but is a good effort.