This article first appeared on the ABBA website in 2004, it has since been updated and edited...click on the photos for larger images
Earlier
last year a new
tree arrived the garden which turned my head.
The Chief had been to an auction the night before and
picked up this little
beauty for absolute peanuts but what a bargain. It’s a
trident Maple of some 35
years standing. It
didn’t sell in the
garden for a few months so the Chief was going to take it back to
auction to
get rid of it, before I stepped in and said that I would happily take
it off
his hands. I
won’t mention the price
now, because if I ever make it back to the fair shores of
Not much of
a looker, thin
trunk relative to the height, terrible
nebari, poor ramification and no
decent
branching structure. It
is hideously pot
bound and in desperate need of some attention.
So why did it make me turn my head?
The leaves. One
of the most
important
ideas in
Bonsai is “Kei Sho So Dai”.
Literally translated means, “small object, big
presence”. With
our little trees in pots we are trying
to represent something
much much bigger, a full size tree, a mountain side or a
vast vista. It’s
all about scale, the
relationship between the trunk thickness to the height of the tree, the
branch
thickness, the nebari etc. These factors are all very
influential but what about my little one? It
doesn’t have any of these key factors, it has a very thin
trunk relative to the
height, a diameter of 45.9 mm to a height of 67 cm.
The nebari are malformed and in need of
serious rework.
The one
thing that it does
have, and the one thing that cannot be changed by the hand of man,
specifically
me, is the leaf type. It
has a naturally
small leaf which makes it the best 
type
of trident maple for bonsai. Trees
vary from area to
area, variant to
variant, the most famous example being the Juniper.
In
