[Bonsai Beginner's weekly thread - 2026 week 35]

Forest evolve a bit on its own.... at least it's still alive (my main goal)

Greetings everyone.

I wanted to introduce myself to the Reddit community.

My name is John. I did a 2.5 year, full time apprenticeship with Michael Hagedorn to learn his eye and learn how to reverse engineer great trees.

I have now been growing and developing trees for over 5 years at my bonsai nursery in Western Oregon. We grow a few dozen species, but mostly focus on 6-7.

My hope is to help develop the domestic supply of quality bonsai.

We sell seedlings as well as finished show material. I plan on posting material for sell at a discount to the Reddit community, but we also have a website with supplies, tools and trees. Our main shipping seasons are spring and fall, so we will be ramping up our listings over the next few weeks.

Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

John Eads

leftcoastbonsai.com

Instagram left.coast.bonsai

Acquired as a seedling, field grown for a decade and collected in 2019. Now in a mix of both pumice and zeolite + 10% akadama & pine bark. Very late in the season the candles are extending rapidly but yet to produce needles, all fingers are crossed.

I acquired this 13 year old Brazilian Rain Tree (my first bonzai) about a month ago and its been acclimating fine in front of large west facing window (New York). I knew that I would likely need to supplement with a grow light in the winter (and perhaps on cloudy days like today) so I purchased a SANSI 32W grow light.

But now I'm wondering if this might be too much supplemental light when combined with the west facing window.

I’m also wondering if a stronger grow light could completely replace the window during the winter? I was considering something like a Mars Hydro TS 1000. I hate how janky this lamp looks and it would be cool if I could create a nice looking setup using an LED panel and move the tree away from the window during the winter. Especially because the area is not well heated and I think temperatures could drop below 50F.

My hibiscus pre-bonsai popped out a huge flower today and I’m loving it.

I bought a 36” tropical hibiscus spring 2025. It bloomed all summer. I overwintered indoors but was loosing the battle to aphids. It survived the winter indoors and I moved it back out in May I started air layering off this bit. We had heavy rain which killed off the aphids but then the trunk rotted. I cut off the air layer prematurely and it’s been spending the summer recovering.

I noticed buds developing a couple weeks ago and this unit popped out overnight. The big flower on the small plant is so out of scale and I love it. I’m looking forward to getting it to branch out in the 2027 season.

Went to Green Witch Gardens yesterday and had a good time. It was smaller than the website lead me to belive but they had a lot of good trees. I forgot to take pictures of the trees but I did come home with a Japanese black pine and a very nice juniper. The goal for this year is to not kill them and make sure they make through the winter. Today, got a Koto Maru Japanese maple and a very small Dawn Redwood. Excited to see what i can do with these two in the future. Dawn Redwood was slippotted from a small plastic pot to the pot it's currently in. I feel that this will hopefully provide better insulation for the roots this winter.

Update on the free junipers: As you you can see in the photos, they are still alive. For now

Should make a nice shohin one day

Berkeley Horticultural Nursery

We will make the Jin look nicer later. Lmk if you have any suggestions or questions. Not my tree but I can definitely raise a suggestion or do some small changes.

Just wanting to show this young juniper a bit. Looking to make it into a semi cascade. Now to let it grow and grow

Anyone with more experience than me feel free to chime in

Got a cute small bonsai for my birthday! Slowly learning what to do with it. Randomly it got scale and I felt so bad for it as I picked off all the damn bugs

I cleaned up that wiring after taking the photo and then promptly forgot to take another picture

I posted this Scot bunjin 6 months ago, it was looking pretty sparse at the time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bonsai/s/g2wCgu8Cdw

It's filled out nicely since then. I pinched the candles in late spring and it has a bunch of nice buds ready for next year.

I need to get the wire off, it's starting to cut in a couple places.

I tried to airlayer my Apple tree in the spring of this year. I cut a 1” strip around the circumference of the branch, applied rooting hormone powder, wrapped wet sphagnum moss in plastic wrap then in aluminum foil. I watered it once or twice per week through spring and summer, and took off the moss ball this week to find it formed some lumpy scar tissue (?) around where I cut with very little (if any) root formation.

And I got a chance to finally use one of my own self made bonsai pots 🥳

This is a Chamaecypris pisifera “King’s Gold” that I recently trimmed up after purchase. Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated. Have a wonderful day!

Last year I purchased a few Japanese Yew (Buddhist Pine) trees that were between 5’-6’ tall, with plans to develop Niwaki trees. My drip irrigation unknowingly failed on me at 1 tree and I lost half the tree to the Texas heat (also had it in a bad spot). I first cut off the dead branches then replanted it into a large wood planter pot this past winter.
My plans were to baby it back for a while then plant in a better spot to continue the Niwaki approach. However I recently saw some pics of this species as bonsai and I’m now considering it. I assumed the leaves were too large for bonsai, but it looks like they make great large bonsai. This tree is now just over 4’ tall and is back to fairly healthy after a good spring/summer.
If you were to turn this into bonsai, how would you approach it?
Thanks for any and all thoughts and discussion!

Bonsai wire is sold in even half millimetre steps. 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, and on up to 6.5. That ladder looks linear, so "go up one size" sounds like it should mean roughly the same thing wherever you are standing on it.

It doesn't. What a wire contributes is its resistance to being bent further, and that is a section property: the section modulus of a round wire goes as the cube of its diameter. Elastic or plastic, both do, so the ratio between two gauges is the same either way. The diameter climbs in even steps and the strength climbs as the cube.

One step at the bottom of the ladder is worth about two and a half steps at the top.

Two practical things fall out of that, and both of them match advice I have seen repeated here.

The first is doubling up. Two wires side by side carry twice the moment of one, and twice the cube of the diameter means multiplying the diameter by 1.26, because 1.26 cubed is 2. At 1.5 mm that lands on 1.89, so two 1.5s are a shade under a single 2.0 and buy you exactly one step. At 4.0 mm it lands on 5.04, so two 4s genuinely stand in for a 5.0, which is two steps up. Using two thinner wires because you don't have the thick stuff is therefore a decent trade on a trunk and close to pointless on a shoot, where a single wire of the next size would have got you almost the same place.

The second is rounding. If a rule of thumb hands you 1.1 mm and the shelf goes 1.0, 1.5, then taking the 1.5 gives you two and a half times the wire you calculated. If it hands you 4.4 mm and you take the 4.5, you are 7% over. Same rounding rule, completely different consequence, and I suspect that is part of why wire on fine shoots so often looks heavier in photos than the person intended.

Where I get stuck is the 1/3 rule itself.

A fixed ratio means the wire's capacity scales as the cube of the branch diameter. The branch's own elastic resistance to being bent to a given radius scales as the fourth power of its diameter. Those two only stay in balance if the radius you are asking for grows in proportion to the branch, which is roughly what happens when you style to scale and not what happens when you want one specific piece of movement in one specific place. On that reading the 1/3 rule should quietly get thin on you as the branch gets thicker.

The honest caveat is that this argument treats the branch as elastic and it is not. Most of what stops a wired branch springing back is the wood taking a permanent set and creeping over the following weeks, not the wire holding it. Comparing gauges to each other needs no assumptions at all, which is why I trust the table. Working out how much wire a given branch actually needs does need assumptions I can't defend, so I am not going to pretend the second half is settled.

Worth disclosing since it is where this came from: I build a bonsai app called Kodama, and its wire calculator does exactly the rounding described above. Until I ran the numbers I had not noticed that the rounding is nearly free at the top of the range and costs a factor of three at the bottom. https://BigBalli.com/Kodama/

So, for people who wire a great deal more than I do. Does a third hold at both ends in practice, or do you find yourself going heavier than a third once a branch is past finger thickness? And does anyone deliberately go under a third on very fine work precisely because the next size up is such a big jump?

A few months ago, I saw a Hinoki listed at a North Carolina nursery called Superba Compacta. I’d heard of Compacta before, a very old cultivar, but never this one, and I couldn’t really find it listed anywhere else, nor could I find a photo of it.

I soon learned that they were the only specimens of their kind, and I bought their stock of 3 plants.

I’ve since pieced together the nearly the whole story. A legendary NC nurseryman named Rick Crowder of Hawksridge bought a one-of-a-kind specimen from a source he doesn’t recall, and after some time, he sold it to a nurseryman I know named Brian Stubbs of Wind River Growers. Brian propagated the tree and he gave it the name Compacta Superba, but he didn’t get any traction on it, so he ended up selling all his liner stock to Panther Creek, which is where I acquired it.

So I seem to have the only commercially available specimens of this plant. Unfortunately the name Compacta Superba doesn’t fit modern cultivar naming guidelines of the RHS as they’re not supposed to be in Latin anymore, and the name is confusing against normal Compacta. So I plan to file to register this name, as I have so much of the backstory.

Some notes on the cultivar:
- Its growth habit is pretty globular and dense.
- it has minimal apical dominance. Barely puts out runners at all.
- I haven’t had it long but given that it is very healthy AND has only put on maybe 2” of growth this year, I think we can call it “slow growing” even for a Hinoki.
- Despite its density, it seems to tolerate internal foliage much better than most hinokis, which are known for their interior dieback.
- it doesn’t tend to form stacked pads very much, and the fans are less perfect arcs than some other cultivars.

I haven’t Well’s Special, Kosteri and Nana Gracilis on hand for comparison.

Comparing with each:
- Wells is very columnar, it has the longest runners of all my Hinoki, extending as far as 1 foot this year, and it is moderately susceptible to interior dieback.
- Kosteri is like a bad hair cut sticking out all over the place, but vigorous and fast growing. Very little internal dieback but that’s largely because there’s a lot of space all the way to the trunk, whereas Bijou is dense all the way around and you have to hunt for the trunk.
- Nana Gracilis forms cute little stacked pads and is pretty dense. The fans are very rounded as if manicured. But slow growing and probably the worst of the bunch at dieback.

Anyway, I hope you find this interesting. I’ve begun propagation, we will see how they do in the spring. I also hope to file with the Royal Horticultural Society soon; we will see how that goes.

Found this squiggly little buddy by a downspout while weeding. It was surviving in a medium of roof shingle grit and leaves. I’ve been keeping it in straight vermiculite and giving it fish emulsion every couple weeks. I haven’t had much luck starting from sprouts I find in cracks and nooks but 🤞🤞🤞