You need to plan how big and in what ideal form you want the trees to be. If left to their own devices, the branches will get longer and longer and more and more open and straggly, and if all you do if trim the ends occasionally you'll get a bush. We make
bonsai by forcing them to grow into what we want, and if you wait too long to guide the trees you'll find yourself in a situation where remedial work is necessary to bring it back to what you want. That's always more painful and less productive than having a plan and closely following it. To that end you can look thru the myriad designs and and choose for each tree and keeping that ideal image in your mind's eye, keep managing the open space that separates trees from bushes. That's what we do: we make space.
By following the rules of bonsai, we make open space and shapes of clouds/layers of canopies by limiting growth that would keep our plants looking like trees instead of bushes. The basic rules are simple: foliage does not grow out of trunks or major branches; nothing is allowed to grow into the space between layers/clouds. Each cloud has an ideal shape and size and when something is threatening to grow beyond the image in our plan we cut back to an internode (at least) one below or within the outside limit. That will probably result in ramification of that stem so that two leaves will grow instead of the one that was there and they will be lower than the limit of the canopy. (This varies by species). The backbone of any cloud is a major branch that ramifies within the ideal shape. Trim to make twigs and foliage grow sideways, Foliage will always grow straight towards the sun: up, so the cloud fills in by ramifying as you trim stems to keep them inside the limits of the cloud shape. You remove one leaf back to the next internode and two grow from there. When there are more than four leaves on each of those stems you trim back to four leaves and they grow four new stems from each totaling eight now , ad infinitum. The leaves get a little smaller and closer together. The bottom of the major branch is bare and we can see the minor branches growing from it from underneath the cloud. Foliage thickly covers the upper side of the cloud so all we see are leaves from the top view.
Eventually you get to the point where the clouds are exactly where and what and how you want them, then the real difficult work begins. Leaves and twigs and branches are not forever and will need to be replaced, little-by-little, on a continuing basis. But that's another set of instructions.
So make a plan for each tree so you can minimize extra steps of excess growth followed by radical trimming. If you want them considerably bigger, then styling takes a back seat for now, but you still need a plan just like driving a car. You don't drive 60 mph and slam on your brakes at the stop sign, you slow down as you approach it so you can stop comfortably right where you want. Select a style and/or make a drawing of what you want. Change it or adjust it as you change your tree evolves.
View attachment 363567
View attachment 363568
