Bonsai: Bonsai: Paperback

Most first trees don't die from neglect. They die from care.

You brought home a small tree in a shallow pot, and within a week you began to worry about it. This is the book for that worry: a 446-page first-year reference that takes a garden-center juniper as seriously as other books take show trees.

A reference, not a pamphlet

Most beginner bonsai guides run around 100 pages, because there is only so much room in a watering chart and a row of icons. This book runs about three times that length, and the difference is not padding. It is cause. Why the repotting window opens at bud-swell and not on a date. Why the same juniper lives outdoors in Portland and dies on a windowsill in Phoenix. Why the pruning cut you are tempted to make in August should wait for March. When you know why, you stop needing the chart.

What's Inside

- 27 chapters in five parts, from reading a trunk line in the nursery row to a tree alive at the end of its first year, kept by someone who finally knows why.- Nearly 60 full-page ink plates: anatomy, styles, techniques, and failure signs, drawn for this book and referenced from the text, not decoration.- The keeping, explained by cause: light, watering, soil, fertilizing, repotting, pruning, wiring, and the first winter, the season that kills most first trees.- The beginner species honestly ranked: juniper, Japanese maple, Chinese elm, ficus, and the rest, including which survive indoors and which only die there slowly.- Month-by-month calendars for five North American climates, so the schedule matches your weather, not a garden halfway around the world.- The chapter most beginner books are too polite to write: what not to do in your first year. And the Japanese vocabulary taught where it appears, never turned into a quiz.

Who it's for

The new owner of a garden-center juniper. The gardener who has killed one bonsai already and wants to know why. The person who received a small tree as a gift and suspects, correctly, that it is going to take a while. No prior experience assumed; no patience with myths included.

Read the free sample. The table of contents and all of Part One are in it. Then give the tree its year.