Repotting Vocabulary - What?!

[MHBonsai]

Maybe the wisdom of B'nut can help me with this. I was in a club meeting with some good natured new bonsai folks and the conversation turned to repotting. They had questions galore. When can I repot? When is it too late, or too early to repot? I have an XYZ and want to repot into this type of soil? etc etc.

It dawned on me as we struggled to answer some fairly simple questions - my vocabulary around repotting is seriously lacking. It seems we call everything that involves touching something below the trunk 'repotting'. And advice for an old established tree 'repot' is so dramatically different from something fresh from a nursery can.

Do the Japanese masters have vocabulary for all of the different ways that we care for a tree's root system, depending on it's development?

I would love it if we had an established root-work vocabulary that matched those above the soil line...chopping, trunk building, development, refinement, etc. You treat every phase differently, and it's the same with the roots right?

Do we have names for these root-work activities that I'm missing out on?

Nursery pot to first training pot
Ground growing hard cutback to training container
Building nebari phase - training container
Container downsizing for aesthetics to slow growth
Refresh/replacement when substrate brakes down
Refresh/replacement when drainage stops
Refresh/replacement on established trees, just a trim back and cleanup
Change of planting angle/restyle
Dropping into a show container for a season, then size up for health
Etc, etc etc....

 

[johng]

Nursery pot to first training pot
Ground growing hard cutback to training container
Building nebari phase - training container
Container downsizing for aesthetics to slow growth
Refresh/replacement when substrate brakes down
Refresh/replacement when drainage stops
Refresh/replacement on established trees, just a trim back and cleanup
Change of planting angle/restyle
Dropping into a show container for a season, then size up for health
Etc, etc etc....

This is a perfect vocabulary!! There is no need to introduce foreign words that only muddy the waters and require English explanations and translations. The one mistake I see is the use of the word nebari...why use a word that has to be explained when you can simply say root base and everyone in your club knows exactly what you mean. Beyond the word bonsai, which is already universally accepted, I quit using Japanese words and terminology long ago and I, nor my students and bonsai friends, have suffered from it.

 

[Michael P]

My revelation on this came when trying to learn all the Japanese terms for the various "styles" or forms. Then I realized that many trees actually do not fit into the Japanese categories and people wind up wasting time arguing about it.

 

[shohin_branches]

Most of what you have is good. A common issue for beginners is the panic when they get to their first bonsai pot to bonsai pot repotting because they see the dense roots as compacted and do too much work on them. I think it's important to differentiate between different types of repotting. Determining the difference between dense roots and compacted roots is an important part of repotting.

One thing that could be added is tie-downs. How you secure your bonsai into a pot is important for repotting and your options change as your roots change and depending on what kind of pot you're using.
This is a really good post about tie-down patterns. https://bonsaitonight.com/2016/12/27/secure-bonsai-pot/

The only thing I know of that has a special term is soji but I forget that one a lot so I actually had to look it up. Understanding the concept is more important than remembering the word. Here is a good article about it on bonsai tonight but I typically refer to it as summer soil maintenance or cleaning up surface compaction.
https://bonsaitonight.com/2010/08/27/summer-soji