I was very fortunate to grab a last minute place on this Northern Ireland Bonsai Society workshop with Peter Warren of Saruyama Bonsai in Newtonards last weekend. A 500 mile round trip in 24 hours left me physically tired, but the experience of working once more with Peter was educational and energising.

My tree was a larch clump collected in late 2014, it was first worked on in early 2016 at a Munster Bonsai Club workshop. It has a main trunk and several smaller trunks radiating around it, which emerge from beneath the surface. Part of any future re-potting will be to explore these secondary trunks and try to make more explicit their connection to the main trunk.

Because it had grown so well over the past few years it was quite dense and cluttered looking. I had expected a lot of growth to be removed and while quite a…