Japanese Maple Bonsai, From A Cutting!

This morning I thought I'd show you one of my favorite trees, an Acer palmatum, or Japanese maple, that I started as a Very small sapling around 15 years ago, and he's become something that I find very beautiful now. The bonsai was started as a tiny rooted cutting that was then grown in the ground to thicken up the trunk. 18 years of watering, pruning, and wiring have resulted in the bonsai you see now in this video. The whole story of this tree and the techniques used to create it feature in my book, Bonsai Inspirations 2. So having seen those images over the years, I hope you can see the progression that's possible from very, very modest material. And it's something that anyone can do given the time and research and working out how to push your trees forward. And you need to have that direction in your mind fairly early on so you know how to push your trees develop them in a relatively shorter period of time. Certainly 15 years is a very long time, and getting your hands on some thicker trunk, for instance, will save you many years of development. And there's still so much more you can do even with a ready-made trunk, as it were, developing the branch structure and the tertiary branches and fine ramification. It takes a lot of time and a lot of pleasure in doing that as well. I hope you found this inspirational, and I'll see you in the next video.