A tale I occasionally recount, but is relevant to the "long game". One of the difficulties with bonsai is understanding when, or at what life stage different techniques are appropriate.
For example, way back in 1973, I had started classes at a community college, I was barely 18 years old. There was a florist shop that I passed on the way to the bus stop. They had little slender less than a year old cuttings of a dwarf pomegranate. I picked one up. Let it grow wild for barely 6 months, then started "practicing bonsai" on it. I'd let it grow maybe 2 or 3 internodes, barely 6 new leaves, and then I'd be pruning it. I let 3 or more branches stay at a node. I immediately moved it to the "best bonsai pot" I could find, a $10 cheap Chinese import. The tree followed me as I moved to university, through 12 changes of domicile in 4 years. Fast forward 32 years, its now 2005. I had been up to this point self taught in bonsai. I took a critical look at the pomegranate. Compared mine to photos on the web and in books of other trees that had been "in training" for 30 or more years, and realized my tree still looked like crap. That is what convinced me I was "missing the point" as a self taught bonsai artist. So I joined the Milwaukee Bonsai Society, and began taking classes, first with one time visits from various artists, one day workshops, then signed up for a 3 year class, where Ted Matson would fly in from California 3 or 4 times a year, in order to capture all the seasonal work that needs to be done. There were 15 or so that split the cost, 6 of us shared Ted on Saturday, 6 on Sunday, and 3 shared him on Monday. We'd split the fee and travel expenses.
The photo below is the pomegranate in 2012, some 39 years after I first stuck it in a small bonsai pot. This trunk is about 14 inches tall, and the diameter is just under 1 inch diameter. Sure, it is pleasant enough, but note, a 39 year old pomegranate should have a trunk more than 1 inch in diameter. When the "old farts" tell you the trunk diameter stops increasing once you move a tree from the ground or a LARGE nursery pot, to a bonsai pot, they are not wrong. I got proof. nearly 40 years and the trunk is only 1 inch in diameter. I suspect your maple will fare similarly. Key is I made all the classic mistakes. Confined the tree to too small a pot, too early in development. I did not allow sufficient extension of branches, to allow the growth needed to thicken the trunk. And I did not have a "good vision" for what this tree could become. Key is, repeated rounds of pruning during the growing season, and keeping the root system confined in a mostly mineeral, inorganic, soil, all lead to a general lack of development. Now in praise of pomegranate as a species for bonsai, it did survive a large number of accidents that none of my other trees from early in my career survived. All my early trees, except this pomegranate perished in one mishap or another. I finally did make a fatal mistake with this tree, it is no longer with me. But it was a learning experience.
to see what 40 year old pomegranates could look like, check out Bonhe's thread on his Pomegranates.
Because I have more than 15 pomegranate at this time, I like to create its own topic to help me organize better! It is beautiful New Year day with lot of sunshine, cool and dry here. It is the best time to perform trimming on the pomegranate. The reason is that its leaves are all gone, so it...
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