STARTING BONSAI AGAIN
LT COL NOEL ELLIS
12/VII/2022
My fascination for Bonsai has been since school days. Our biology teacher taught us the art of making one.
It was in 2018 that we happened to visit Bangalore. A trip to the ‘Botanical Gardens’ is a must for every plant lover. We just froze when we visited their Bonsai collection. We wondered; did they leave any plant on earth which they hadn’t converted into a Bonsai?
That day my wife and I decided that we shall have our own collection. Whatever be the effort we shall put in. Even if our experiments fail, it doesn’t matter but try we definitely shall. The point was, with what species of plant to start. We took the challenge and wanted to start with something which was available at home.
We had just moved into our bungalow. Two plants, a Tamarind and Star fruit, had already been picked up long back. Somehow, they kept lying and in between the rainy season arrived. We kept postponing planting them. They flourished well in their bags for more than a year plus and were growing well. Their roots found their way through the holes of those bags and got rooted to the ground. From one foot they were now about four feet tall.
One day after the rains, I sat in the backyard in my greenhouse to convert them into Bonsai. In the poly bag, to my surprise, except for the top layer of soil, the plants had consumed the rest of it. As I washed the roots, they were all intertwined and an entangled mesh. As I was working on the roots the tap root snapped. That’s what our biology teacher had taught us. To leave the meshy roots and cut the tap root. It happened on its own.
Preparations of special flat pots had already been done. Homemade compost was ready as a perfect potting mix. Having clipped & snipped the unwieldy mesh of roots to a bare minimum, the plant was ready to be re-potted. Its trunk was clipped to about a foot high, from where the ‘first’ branch was sprouting. With a prayer on my lips and fingers crossed, pots were placed at the same location where they were flourishing before the rains.
Soon, all the greenery on the plant dried up. Every leaf fell, leaving a bare stem pointing towards the sky. I kept telling myself that after chopping the roots so mercilessly, more leaves should have been left. Now things couldn’t be undone.
The bare brown stem kept hurting my eyes. I kept feeling guilty. Just to see if there is life left in the plant, I scratched the trunk with my thumbnail. My eyes lit up, when I saw green colour showing under the wood. There was hope.
Soon, a 'green eye'; shot out from the trunk indicating branches would grow and they did. Two trees which could have grown to fifty feet or more were now growing about one foot high. Mission was successful. These plants, once they grew enough branches and appeared sturdy enough, were moved to face the sun and the weather and flourished.
Now comes the Jodhpur chapter. Here we tried a Pepal, Banyan and Tamarind tree. They have sprouted well and now form part of our collection. Neem shall be my next experiment for Bonsai. It grows here abundantly and happily.
As the monsoons have come, it is a suggestion to all my plant lovers that it is the right time to prune your plants. It would rejuvenate them. Don’t feel bad if a bud or two has to be sacrificed for which we generally delay trimming. Plants will bless you with many more buds.
Will my friends send us good wishes for our next experiment? I wonder!!!!!!!!!!
JAI HIND
© NOEL ELLIS
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