The second stop on our garden tour was to Kunio Kobayashi’s bonsai garden, Shunka-en. Located just outside Tokyo (and a fair drive from Kimura’s garden) it was begun by his father some seventy years ago. The garden was the largest I’d seen that day and very impressive. We were greeted by trees before we ever set foot in the garden–they were even on the roof!

Once inside the gate, we were ushered past familiar, famous old junipers and pines to the indoor Tokonoma display area by our guide, whose name I forgot, but has been an apprentice there for two years now and speaks excellent English.

The first display featured an Ume, or Japanese flowering plum, one of the first trees to flower in early spring:

The next display featured a Japanese black pine with a cascading branch and the elements of display suggesting water as the black pine grows…

Trees grow from the tips, gaining mass behind them. In bonsai the goal is to control how the tips grow (shape and balance) and manage how they gain the mass along the way. We use that growth in many ways; building mass to make branches bigger, to make entire parts of the tree bigger, or to put the finishing touches in the form of ramification.

The “clip and grow” term is used to describe letting a branch grow until it has 5 or more leaves, then trimming it back to one or two. This is performed during the growing season. Each node has a dormant bud where the leaf stem attaches to the branch, which can be signaled to grow when the branch is trimmed back. A dormant bud is circled in red below:

Grow the branch to 5 or more nodes (leaves):

Trim it back to 2:

Dormant buds…