Professional bonsai and suiseki from Peter Warren. Japanese bonsai educated by well known bonsai master Kunio Kobayashi.
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This article first appeared on the ABBA website in 2004, it has since been updated and edited...
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 Albion then I will hopefully be bringing this tree with me, possibly to help pay back those nice people at the Student Loans Company…
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 importantnebari 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 grafttype of trident maple for bonsai. Trees vary from area to area, variant to variant, the most famous example being the Juniper. In Japan the Juniper leaf type varies greatly from north to south, east to west, with the best being the hallowed Itoigawa variant with its beautiful radiant green, compact foliage. The worst is from Hokkaido and Tohoku in the north with their long, stringy blue leaves which never become compact or attractive in anyway. Thankfully with Junipers you can graft in Itoigawa foliage onto a Tohoku tree and “make” a much better tree over time.