Penjing/bonsai pre-training basics

摘要

When does bonsai training begin? Hobbyists like to think it begins when they acquire a plant and start. But based upon the axiom that masterpiece bonsai begins with plants that have masterpiece potential quality, training really begins much earlier! Even if a tree is collected, unless you dug a very young seedling, Nature created the potential. This sequence attempts to explain how high potential trees are trained at Fuku-Bonsai. The subject is Bird's Tongue Podocarpus, a tree made famous by the latepenjing master Yee-sun Wu of Hong Kong. We obtained unrooted cuttings during a 1981 American Bonsai Society China Bonsai Tour led by the" late Dorothy Young which included a visit to the home of Yee-sun Wu and the major bonsai centers in the People's Republic of China. I was allowed to take cuttings from a tree growing in an arboretum. The cuttings were wrapped in damp paper napkins in a Ziploc bag and rooted after we returned to Hawaii.