Here goes... I would first advise you to do some reading, so you get an idea what it's all about, and don't end up getting something home with no idea how to keep it alive - bonsai are not house plants and in fact, the majority are grown outdoors, where they do better, but if you have no outdoor place to grow things, then you can grow tropicals, which are often grown with supplementary lighting, humidity, etc. Bonsai is a lifelong learning 'hobby' (to most of us, it becomes an obsession very quickly), but as you need to know at least the basic horticultural requirements, and how to choose appropriate trees for your environment, it's important to start by reading (many books available, plus www.bonsai4me.com, www.bonsaihunk.us/cultural.html (for tropicals), and www.evergreengardenworks.com), all of which give good overviews on bonsai in general, and info. on growing specific trees. A really good intro for you would be a local club/assoc., so you get to see hands-on what it's about (there is a lot involved re pruning roots, various ways to shape the tree, why it's important to know in which season to do what work for which tree, how to 'compose' various soil mixes, and maybe most important - how to water (sounds silly til you understand what it entails and how important it is to get it right). Every tree has diff. requirements and every environment is different in various aspects, so find out first if in fact you really would want to get started on the journey, but stay far away from little pots in big stores sold as 'Bonsai' - most of which are just cuttings of larger trees stuffed into little pots with one-size-fits-all care tags [useless!] stuck on them, and imported from overseas in huge truckloads, with pebbles glued(!) to the soil that then need removal, and sold in bad soil destined to discourage you after the trees die of root rot if not repotted into the right stuff. Patience is the first thing you need and if you don't have it, you won't get far, but if you do, you can have an awful lot of rewarding time learning to take care of your little trees (did you know bonsai can be as large as 4' tall and wide?). PS - the trees only end up being 'miniature', but start out as 'regular' trees, not some odd 'special' type of plants. They're more often cut down from larger ones, rather than grown up into 'bonsai', so as to keep the illusion of age with a fat (and well tapered) trunk, but new batches of smaller branches and leaves, and bonsai pots are often not used until the trees are ready for display, sometimes being 'grown out' in the ground for years - the fastest way to achieve good trunk girth. To (finally!) answer your question - every tree grows at a different rate, but you'll learn which are which along the way, but you'll also find that a good place to start is a local nursery (if not supermkt for tropicals) rather than a place that sells 'Bonsai'.

Just last night I finished writing a piece about why you can't amend a water-retentive medium with coarse material. I wrote it specifically as a rejoinder to the very often repeated advice that adding 1 part of perlite to one or 2 parts of water-retentive medium will somehow yield a 'good' medium. I plan on posting it as a thread because it's important for growers to understand that a half measure won't necessarily improve your lot by half. Punked by Perlite? In any forum that is even marginally related to container growing, you'll find the oft repeated advice that you can make a silk purse from a sow's ear by adding together equal measures of an overly water-retentive potting media and perlite. Many growers erroneously believe that you can start with a medium comprised of fine particulates and miraculously make it better by adding perlite. You can't ..... and I'll explain why. Let our starting point be any soil you're so uncomfortable with you feel it needs 'amending' to increase aeration and drainage. Store shelves from coast to coast offer up hundreds of examples, and fora are full of threads that offer suggestions re how to fix them. If there's a standardize version of the advice, it would have to be, “Mix 1 or 2 parts of it [and it rarely seems to matter what 'it' is] with 1 part of perlite and all will be well; but …… will it? Let's look closer. The answer is – the suggested mixture will not perform any where near as well as you might intuit. Just how is perlite supposed increase aeration when it has no internal porosity? By what miracle does a nonporous particle added to a water-retentive container medium, or a bowl of oatmeal for that matter, increase air porosity? Let's say that you have a gallon of Miracle-Gro potting media - the stuff with the moisture control feature, and to it you add a gallon of perlite. Adding perlite is pretty much the same as adding BBs or marbles. If you screened the fines out of the perlite, you end up with 2 gallons of medium, twice the volume; however the double volume ONLY comes with the amount of aeration that was in the gallon of medium that so needed fixing. We sure didn't get any aeration from the perlite. There is no way to deny that with twice the volume of medium and no more than the volume of air already contained in the original gallon you've actually reduced the per volume total air porosity by 50%; AND, the more perlite you add, the worse it gets. Total porosity continues to diminish as you add perlite until you reach a threshold level of coarse material that occurs at the point where there is no longer enough of the original fine material in the newly created medium to fill all the spaces between the large particles of perlite. That will not occur in most practical applications until the fraction of large perlite particles is in the 75-90% range. If your medium consists of 75-90% perlite, it would be misleading to suggest that you're growing in medium X amended with perlite, when you're growing in perlite amended with medium X. We don't take coffee with our sugar or cream, we take sugar or cream with our coffee. In essence, when you begin with a poor medium based on fine particulates, and start adding coarse material like pine bark, perlite, pumice ....... it gets much worse (from the plant's POV) before it starts to get better. If you add an insufficient volume of coarse material – it stays worse. Perlite's primary benefit lies in the fact that it occupies space that might otherwise be filled with saturated medium. Simply put, media comprised of fine particles with perlite added will hold less water on a per volume basis than the same media without perlite, but the aeration level in the fraction of the medium available for root colonization will be roughly the same with or without perlite. Visualize adding a pint of perlite to a pint of sand, then ask yourself whether or not the perlite helped by adding aeration. The answer is a resounding NO. Did it help with drainage? Only to the degree it decreased the amount of water the medium can hold on a per volume basis, but this is something of a hollow victory. More on that in a subsequent paragraph. If we want to take advantage of what well-aerated media have to offer, we need to understand how to EFFECTIVELY use the materials at our disposal. If you have on hand pine bark in an appropriated size, perlite, and sphagnum peat, you can mix them in such a way that the end result is a highly productive medium for container culture; or, the same ingredients can be combined in ways that render them practically unusable. Growers would be much better served to use water-retentive media like as it is from the bag, in combination with the well-reasoned use of ballast in the bottom of the pot than to make a wreck of their medium by adding an insufficient amount of perlite or other coarse materials. The science applies to total porosity and air porosity at container capacity. When using perlite as an 'amendment' to water retentive media, it would also be better to determine the height of the PWT the soil supports (easy peasy), then mix 4 parts of perlite with 1 part of the medium, and fill the bottom of the pot with that mix to the ht of the PWT. Then top it off with the water-retentive mix - unamended. This would be much more effective than amending the entire volume of medium in the pot with perlite. Remember - perlite's job is to take up space, and the space it occupies cannot be colonized with roots. This is the 'hollow victory' I mentioned in a preceding paragraph. While perlite takes up space that might otherwise be full of saturated soil, and in that reduces the volume of water the soil can hold, it also reduces the volume of soil available for root colonization. Space available to roots to grow is still filled with fine particles, which still hold roughly the same amounts of water they did before the perlite was added. Many things can be used to significant benefit if used judiciously, most of those things can put us at a disadvantage if used capriciously. Understanding the role of perlite, and other ingredients that serve as potential additions to container media are steps toward getting to the point where we're far more likely to be limited by things like climate, light levels, and humidity …… than our own skills. Al

I agree that peat isn't a requirement as part of a container soil, even though it makes up the lions share of almost all commercially prepared soils; and like you, I could get along just fine without it. In the way I look at soils, used as a small fraction of a soil it just happens to serve a purpose as a handy way to adjust water retention of the bark-based mediums I prefer for shorter term plantings. Just as you understand peat's appeal to others, I understand the reasons why you and others might not want to use it, and I'm fine with whatever people decide. That doesn't mean that if someone proposes to substitute coir for peat that I wouldn't point out the potential shortcomings of coir - I guess it's just that thing of mine that requires I do all I can to make sure people get the facts they need to make their own informed decisions. Unless we dig up soil from our gardens, pretty much anything we choose to grow in will be completely foreign to plants. What I find intriguing is that we are able to build our container soils from a mix of only a few materials, all completely foreign to plants, and provide a medium that plants much prefer to the soils where they naturally occur. Perhaps it takes a nerd to find art in that search - I see it plainly, and I'm sure many of us find artistry in places others never bother to consider. If someone who never grew a plant in a container in their life came to me and asked for the one piece of advice that would have the greatest impact on their growing experience, without question it would have to be, 'Learn how to build a superior soil or recognize one when you see it. It will pay big dividends.' I heard an announcer for a MMA fight yesterday criticize a fighter's strategy. He said, "If he keeps on doing what he's doing, he's going to keep on getting what he's getting." Paraphrased, it might have been said that if he wants to improve his lot, he's going to have to change something. It's perfectly ok if he thinks his strategy is working ...... as long as he doesn't mind being beat about the head, thorax, and sundry other body parts. Growing is like that in some ways. We all have decisions to make about what is or isn't good enough for us as individuals. If we're happy with the soils we're using - that's great; but if you think there is a path to improvement you'd like to take, it's going to take some effort and change. No one cares whether a person chooses to improve his lot or not, other than the interest we all have in seeing everyone get all they can from the growing experience. That decision making process absolutely should include the knowledge of what's out there, and how various decisions are likely to affect the growing experience. Only then can someone move toward an informed decision. It's easy to tell everyone that "You're only a beginner - you don't need to know all that stuff - this has always been good enough for me, so it should be good enough for you", but that is being terribly presumptuous. I can't tell you how many people have told me, "I wish I'd have known all this years ago", or any one of a number of other similar statements - dozens and dozens surely, but more likely hundreds - I couldn't count it's been so many. That's how I know it's better to inform people and let them decide intelligently than to presume it's better to keep them in the dark, just in case the information is too much to handle. The interesting debates and discussions you referred to are a big part of that process, so we're agreed there, too. How we present our views and support them is pretty much all people have to go on when they DO make decisions. The petty, personal bickering that occasionally erupts is certainly not helpful, but disagreement in itself is healthy and an excellent way for adults to learn & to gain help in their decision making. Best luck. Al

Nazanine, Thank you for your comments and great sense of humour. compacta had a home 'spa' treatment today. First I took it off the macrame hanger and removed the pot to examine the roots , ( which looked very healthy ). Then , I actually did soak the hanging parts in the bathtub with warm water. I used Biolage shampoo for colour treated hair. I splashed soapy water on the crown , where the worst problem was. After plugging in a strong desk lamp for better light , I meticulously cleaned the curly leaves with cotton ear swabs. It took about 15 minutes. The kids didn't even ask what I was doing , because they already know I'm 'over the edge' when it comes to plants ! Today was beautiful here, about 78 degrees , sunny and breezy, so I spread the plant on the lawn , and hosed all the soap off. I top dressed the potting mix and gave it a thorough watering to flush the soil of soap. Then after a re examination , I zapped it with a systemic insecticide , and hung it back up to dry off in the warm breeze. Everything else around here got scrutinized for "@%#@?" Thanks again , now I need the spa ! Florajilly