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I've been making slab built bonsai pots for a while. One of my biggest issues is dealing with warping. I now use Laguna #75. I chose it because of its low water absorption and color. 1. Can anyone suggest a cone 6 clay body with very low warping and less than 2% water absorption? 2...

Are nanban pots supposed to have feet? Do nanaban pots without feet sometimes have drainage issues?

I'm not a subscriber to Mirai live and I've wonderd for a while now how/when he deals with the field soil at the center of the root ball beneath the trunk. At some point in the video, Ryan alludes to the fact that his approach departs from what he learned in Japan; I find that very...

Sometime in the mid 80's, a member of our club bought two rectangular 12" pots in Japan. They're very clean and precise. Look to be mold made to my eye. One is made from a gray clay and unglazed. The other is made from a white/beige clay and has a satin blue glaze. Can anybody read the chop...

I'm a hobby potter/wheel teacher and I was asked to do a short presentation on pottery for our local bonsai club. I wanted to say a little bit about antique Chinese containers and show some pictures. There are lots of nakawatari era pot pictures on the web, but I'm having trouble finding...

Does it depend on the vigor of the tree?

I lost the labels on some of my grafted jwp cultivars. Does anybody know of any tell=tale features that distinguish the similar looking cultivars of kokonoe and hagarumo from each other?

In the video, Bjorn indicates that new candles are partially cut just as new needles are emerging. The needles are barely visible and the sheaths are clearly still on the needles. This happens in Tennessee some time in mid April. On his web page species guide, however, Bjorn indicates that...

When wiring spruce, how far out on to the branch tip do you wire? Also, do you just wire over needles? I can't believe you'd try to wire between those tiny things.

1. When is it too late to do fall needle plucking, shoot selection, and wiring? 2. Is there a wrong time of year to do major branch pruning/trunk reduction?

A couple of months back, a member of our local club asked me why a person couldn't just treat Japanese black pines like single flush pines. I didn't have a good answer, but I'm sure there is one. The specific issue in question was decandling.

I had no idea that Scots pine should (could?) be decandled like Japanese black pine. Bjorn Bjorholm and Ryan Neil have cautioned against this, but David's tree looks pretty vigorous to me. Anybody have an opinion about this one way or the other?

There are several species in the history of bonsai that, for me, carry a kind of mystique. Ezo spruce is one of those. Before he discontinued them, Brent Walston sold me a few 4" liners. I killed them but don't know if it was my bungling (very likely) or my climate. I'm at very low elevation...

Club members have zero experience with ceramics. I was thinking of throwing wall rings, foot rings, rolling out slabs, and providing some slump molds, and templates. I'll also let them do pinch pots. I'll let them pick glazes, but I'll do the glazing and firing. I think it would be fun if...

On two flush pines, buds are reduced to two in mid fall. Do I also do this with my single flush species? I'm specifically interested in Ko Ko No E jwp.

1. Given the length of these buds, am I in the root pruning and repotting window? 2. Could I have root pruned and repotted as soon as I began to see the bare beginning of 1 or 2 new light green buds? 3. Could I wait longer?

I still don't quite understand what the "accepted" ramification structure is supposed to be on bonsai. I've seen on various tutorials that pines should be grown so that the primary branch splits into two, those branches are split into two and so on. The primary branch ends at the very first...

When doing free scion grafts on ficus, do I need to protect the foliage of the scion from moisture loss just as one does when conifer grafting? I use the parafilm cocoon method when grafting pines. Can/should I use the same method for my golden gate ficus?

I'm still not quite clear on which year's needles are pulled from single flush pines in the fall. I know it's not the current year's needles, but is it the second or third year's? Are sylvestris, parviflora, and mugo handled differently?

I still get the heebie-jeebies about root pruning older established pine bonsai. I'd like to get opinions about the quality of the technique demonstrated in this root pruning/repotting video. Could more root have been taken off without endangering the tree? Could the guy have just sawed off...

When it is suggested that the length of a pot be about 2/3 the height of the bonsai, is the height measured from the bottom of the pot foot or the soil line?

Recently, Walter Pall made a remark on here about Dan Robinson's repotting habits. I thought maybe Walter was joking or exaggerating. I then read an interview with Dan Robinson where he claimed that bonsai should be repotted much more rarely than most people recommend. Twenty five year...

Even though I've been messing around with pines for years, I'm just now getting to the refinement stage on some of them. This year was the first year I decandled any of my pines. I decandled on June 1st. It took forever for the new buds to pop and I thought the candles would be way too...

I have jwp grafted onto jbp root stock. The trees are planted in pine bark and perlite. Several are in 1 quart pots and several are in 1 gallon pots. When I examined the root balls, most of the trees seemed root bound. At the bottom of the pots, there was a mat of circling roots that looked...

I'm going to order some bulk seedlings from Musser Forest and I'd like to get some spruce. Is one of those species more attractive or easier to work with than another?