The bonsai bible

Author: David Squire

Publisher: New Holland; ISBN 9781847732309; A4 soft cover; 158 full-colour pages, incl. glossary and index.

...Growing bonsai is an all-consuming hobby and one that will entrall you with its techniques and artistry. Traditional bonsai is the practics of growing miniature hardy trees, shrubs and conifers in containers outdoors in temperate areas according to time-honoured Chines and Japanese customs, wheras indoor bonsai is concerned with growing tropical and subtropical shrubs and trees indoors, again mainly in temperate climates, but also in warm and colder areas.

Traditional bonsai can be tracked back 1000 or more years to China, while there are claims that a form of growing miniature trees was known much earlier in India. Whatever its true origin, traditional bonsai has come to be associated with religious throughts and naturalism, as well as with the concept that mountains, trees and rocks have a soul. Some bonsai historians even suggest that the gnarled and contorted shapes of the miniature trees represent the bodies of the immortal in the next world...

About 1200 years ago the Japanese absorbd bonsai into their culture, where it was perfected into an art steeped in beauty and correctness. It is this preciseness of purpose, and desire for perfection in mirroring nature, that has encapsulated the soul of bonsai. Incidentally, the term bonsai is derived from bon-sai, bon being the Japanese word for 'tray', while sai translates as 'planting'. The word 'bonsai' is both singular and plural in its usage.

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