Our favorite Shohin Bonsai at Rakuyo... and where they came from!

How's it going, everybody? Welcome to the Deciduous Bonsai Channel. I'm your host, Andrew Ropson, and I'm joined today by my friend and student, Machak. Hello, hello. Just got back from shohin school. You've been all shohin all day for several days. We just spent a few hours producing some shohin display videos. We just happened to have a whole bunch of really nice shohin in the studio. We were thinking of maybe just showing them to the viewers and talking a little bit about each tree. Yeah, let's do it. Before we walk these back into the greenhouse, something that's important with shohin, I think, is where do shohin come from? What are the origins of these things? How do we make shohin? So maybe we'll just kind of share with you all the shohin that we have sitting around and talk about where they came from. All right, let's do it. So our first tree. Tell me a little bit about this one. Yeah, this is a shohin Japanese maple. This is one of my oldest trees. I've had this tree since probably 2008. It was probably half as thick back then when we got it, so the trunk has actually grown quite a bit. But this shohin Japanese maple I got at a 2008 shohin convention in St. Louis, Missouri when I was in high school. And I think we got it from Jim Doyle, Nature's Way Nursery. And yeah, it's since developed really, really nicely over that period of time. Very cool, and is this a special cultivar or is this the result of ramification? Because this has incredibly small internodes and tiny little buds. Yeah, super small internodes, super short leaves. That's just regular Japanese green leaf maple. We could plant this in the ground and it'd grow 15, 20 foot tall trees. So yeah, just fun little Japanese maple that we have in the mix. Another tree that I got at that shohin seminar was this juniper here. This is a shimpaku juniper. This was the first bonsai workshop that I ever did. I did this workshop with Taiga Urushibata in 2008 that same exact convention. Yeah, it was super cool. And this was actually like a medium sized bush when I got it. It was this kind of big puffy thing. And our very first step was to take this bush that his father grew at his nursery, Taisho-en in Shizuoka, Japan. And we just kind of really tightly compacted it and really twisted it up. It's gone through a lot of several iterations of work ever since then. It's in a nice, beautiful eco pot now. I had this at the Pacific Bonsai Expo as a second tree with my white chochibai. So it's been at the Pacific Bonsai Expo. It's been with me since 2008. And yeah, one of my fun little useful junipers. Great example of how in bonsai sometimes we go from big to small. Yeah, this was a big tree that worked down to a smaller thing. Just a big bush when I got it. Take a look at it. The next tree was completely the opposite. So this is a forsythia. This little forsythia I moved to Oregon with in 2016 in the back of my little small Honda. This was just a cutting. This was a rooted cutting that my friend John Kirby gave me. It was like the size and height of a pencil. So just a little tiny stick. When I got it, it had no ramification, nothing. It was in a little plastic two inch by two inch pot. And I brought this with me. It was one of the very few trees that came to Oregon with me when I started my apprenticeship with Michael Hagedorn. And yeah, it was just a little nothing plant. I put it in like a two or three gallon nursery pot for several years to try and beef it up. We started getting some multiple trunks. So I kind of went with that really useful plant. With shogun, you're gonna notice a lot of these trees have a lot of visual mass. And in the last two trees, that visual mass was kind of manifested in the trunk. This visual mass is made up of lots of small trunks. Yeah, lots of ramification too. Yeah, yeah. These dwarf forsythia species get really, really dense and twiggy. So fun plant, you can take a big tree and cut it down to shogun, or you can take a little cutting and grow it into a really nice shogun as well. It's in a bright yellow pot, which really allows it to pop when we put it on those display specials. Yeah, for contrast against other types of colors or glazes or things like that. Yeah. Again, is this something special genetics-wise or does forsythia like to do this once you do the right techniques? This particular forsythia is a dwarf forsythia. So unlike the maple, this is a particular dwarf. However, you can make a forsythia shohin with a regular leaf forsythia. It doesn't necessarily have to be dwarf. So yeah, you can do lots of different ways to get there. Pivoting over, you know, Jonas and I have done several years of these shohin seminars. And the thing that we noticed that people struggle with is they don't have enough broadleaf evergreens. They have a lot of conifers, they have a lot of deciduous, but they don't have a lot of these leafy broadleaf evergreen trees. So what species is this? This is a gumi, an Eliagnus. Really, really- We just talked about this species. Yeah, we did a podcast episode about Eliagnus. It's the one tree that everybody really should be growing, not just for shohin, but for big trees as well. When you're making a deciduous display, as we talk about in our Anatomy of a Shohin series, this is a really useful plant that you have to have to have something evergreen, but not have a conifer. I got this tree, let's see, this was an imported tree, I believe, that I got. And it basically had no ramification when I got it. So this was kind of, this was the path of already buying something, you know, a nice trunk, and then with bonsai technique, we can add all of the branches on top. And how long did it take to go from sort of trunk material to sort of this ramified canopy? This was probably three or four years. So, yeah, yeah. So from not very long, just, you know, defoliating this probably two, three times a year, it's probably gonna be defoliated here in the next week or two. But yeah, this from kind of stumpy trunk to branches, it did have some primary branches, but from trunk and primary branches to a nice usable display silhouette, just a few years. So buying a nice pre-bonsai can definitely kind of get you to the finish line a little bit faster. Yeah, this is a species that wants to play, for sure. Oh, yeah. Gumi doesn't mess around. It's a great, great plant and a really fun species to play with. So next up. This is an ume, a Japanese flowering apricot, not commonly seen for a shohin. I bought this tree as a chuhin, or medium-sized bonsai. And I bought this tree from a friend of mine, Steve. But this tree, like I said, it was a medium-sized tree. It had a much bigger silhouette. And one day I was looking at it. It was in a huge pot. It had that bigger silhouette. But I said, you know what? That's actually a really great little small trunk. I should just chop it back. So I trunk-chopped it. We recently wired it the last few days before shohin seminar. I was down in California doing a little bit of work on my own trees, getting them spruced up for the show. Got a bit of a hollow that I can see right here. It's got a little bit of a hollow. So there's a, like umes have a lot of kind of deadwood or shari on them. And this has some nice visual interest to kind of investigate when you see anything in it. So kind of rare species for shohin bonsai in particular, but really, really fun to have and play with. And I think that's gonna be a really nice showable tree once that wire sets in a year or so. Now, a lot of viewers are probably gonna be wondering, what's the flowering like at the shohin scale on a tree like this? The flowering is normal. So the leaf size, the inner nodes, all of those can shrink down with good technique, but your flowers will always be the same size. So it's gonna have, you know, which an ume doesn't have crazy size flowers to begin with. They're about the size of like a nickel. Yeah. So you're gonna have that same size flower at this scale. It's gonna look pretty awesome. That's right. All right, moving on. Now, our next tree is a Japanese black pine. This is another pre-bonsai that I got. I bought this from my very good friend, Jonas Bonsai Tonight. And as many of you know, Jonas grows a lot of pines and colanders. So I bought this as a pine and a colander. It had a big sacrifice branch when I bought it. That's since been cut. I grew a second sacrifice branch on it. That's since been cut. I can see that. Yeah, and so now we have like a nice top of the box tree. This is a really, really important tree if you wanna build shohin bonsai displays. This kind of informal, upright moyogi style pine is so useful for the top of a five tree box stand or a three tree box stand. If you don't know what that term means, definitely watch the shohin display series. Yeah, anatomy of a shohin. But this is a really, really useful tree to have. And it's something that is one of the easiest to use trees in our traditional kind of shohin display format. Yeah, I got that as pre-bonsai from my friend, Jonas Bonsai Tonight. And I have several more in the works to have some different variations. So I have one that flows to the left, one that flows to the right. What do we have here? That is an ibota, privet. This is a tree that, again, this goes back to a very, very early point in my bonsai journey. I bought this from Hollow Creek Bonsai in Rochester, New York, which I don't think is around anymore. We probably bought this in 2005, 2006, 2007, somewhere in that timeframe. And yeah, it's just survived our entire kind of journey throughout bonsai. This was just an online purchase. And all it really had was this really nice stumpy trunk to it, which just kind of comes out of the soil, dives back down, and creates almost like a nice little semi-cascade movement. So naturally for the silhouette of the tree, we went with that semi-cascade form. Did you start with that stumpy trunk, but not a lot of branching? Did you build the branching yourself? Yeah, we started with that stumpy trunk. It probably had a little bit of branching, but definitely not a semi-cascade feeling like it has now. I think it was just like an upright tree. Oh, so a big angle change happened. Yeah, so a big angle change happened. These flow trees, these trees that have a strong directional flow are also really, really useful in display. And having that kind of nice, kind of strong dynamic movement in the trunk made for a very obvious design to make this into that semi-cascade. It's potted in a pot that I got from my friend Daisaku Nomoto, who's our headliner for the Winter Shohin Seminar, a Shohin master from Japan. He always brings these fantastic pots from Japan. And having these painted pots in display is actually make really nice variation of glaze types when we have multiple glaze pots. So, yeah, really, really fun tree. Dates back to my early years in bonsai. Very cool. It's showing a lot of age. Is this any particular type of privet? Is this a Chinese privet or a different type of privet? I don't know the Latin on this one, actually. But it is, I think it is a Japanese privet. And it's a very common plant that they use in Shohin displays over there. So, something that we don't see a lot of here in the U.S., but something that's very common at Gafu Ten, the top Shohin school in Japan. Next up. Yeah, next up we have a really fun little broadleaf evergreen. This is a pyracantha. And it's kind of an exposed root style. I got this tree from Soothin, who's a bonsai professional in Boston, Massachusetts, kind of region of the U.S. He's famous for making Shohin, or small trees. He's one of the top Shohin artists in North America. And I bought this tree at the U.S. National Show. Again, I bought it as a pre-bonsai, you know, but it's got a very young silhouette. You know, so many times, I have a lot of informal upright trees, I have a lot of cascade trees, I have a lot of clump style trees, but this exposed root is a nice way to get variation in trunks, so that we can have one more type of contrast in a Shohin display. There's definitely a lot more line in this, rather than weight. Like, I'm looking at almost like a calligraphy or something. Yeah, it's a nice little bit of craziness going on here, which balances some of our more stable trees that we tend to use in this place. So, the silhouette on this tree is relatively young, and relatively small, but it's a really, really great trunk that we can kind of build off of in the future. It's the kind of tree that makes you wonder, how was it made? How did they do that? Yeah, exposed roots have their own kind of fun techniques. Usually, they use really large soil, like kind of almost, you know, gravel size soil to put in there. Something that's challenging, the size classification of Shohin, I think. Yeah, this is not a Shohin. This is a Kifu size tree, which is the next size category up. Shohin are trees from the four to eight inch range, or the 10 to 20 centimeter range. Or approximately about that long. Yeah, approximately that long. A Kifu tree is 20 to 30 centimeters, or eight to 12 inches. And Kifu size trees oftentimes started as Shohin that just kind of, over time, just grew and got a little bit too big. Did that happen here? That definitely happened here. This was the workshop in the second St. Louis Shohin convention. This was a tree that was grown and imported by Koji Hiramatsu in Japan. And so, this was, again, just another workshop tree that I just happened to have. I think that convention was either 2010 or 2012, something like that. So this tree has been with me for a very long time. But yeah, it's just a really, really nice Kifu size Chinese elm. One of the nice things about choosing Chinese elm is you get kind of ramification and density for free as long as you just keep up with the trimming each year. And the bark gets a nice little reflection of age. Oh yeah, it's got great age. So don't forget about Kifu size too. They're really, really important for three-point displays. And we're actually considering, if we can get enough entries, adding a Kifu category to the Pacific Bonsai Expo, where you can kind of celebrate a lot of these slightly overgrown Shohin. Formerly known as Shohin section, I guess. Yeah, or plus-size Shohin, just the next size up. Now, the next tree. Got a trinity for you. Yeah, this is a tree that I got at a club swap meet. One of the great reasons to join a local bonsai club is that it's all- Anywhere you are. Anywhere you are in the world, is that there's often really, really great access to material. This was a $20, this is a Tsukomo cypress, a $20 Tsukomo cypress that I got. It was in a two-gallon nursery can when we picked it up. And it had just really, really great structure. Someone probably grew this from a cutting. These Tsukomo cypress root really easily from cutting. And they probably just kind of grew it and trained it. I don't think it's had much wire on it, but it's a species that really doesn't need a lot of wiring. But yeah, this is my $20 kind of club swap meet tree. How long has it been since it was a cutting, do you think? This is quite a bit of girth for a cutting. It's probably a good 15, 20 years old, my guess would be. Very nice bark, too. Yeah, it has a really, really nice kind of cypress feeling. Unlike a lot of the conifers, like the junipers and the pines, which we tend to wire the branches down pretty strongly, a cypress is a nice way. Or you could use a seca hinoki for this as well, or a cryptomeria, where you can have a little bit more lift in the branches. So you can create that contrast or variety in the conifer kind of branch shape and angle. It's just set them apart. Really cool to look from underneath that branching structure. Yeah, they're really, really great plants. So sucomo cypress, really easy to maintain, easy to take care of. So next up, we have something that's a little bit more in progress, I guess you could say. Yeah, this is also probably a kyufu-sized tree. A little bit young in its training. I only got this tree a couple years ago. I got this tree from a local club member, bonsai club member. So again, another reason to join your local bonsai club wherever you are in the world. Did you nuke all the branches when you started? I did. This was a tree that was in a, it was probably in like a two-gallon-sized pot. And it was, you know, the silhouette of it was probably about this big. It was a proper medium-sized bonsai. And I looked at it and I said, wow, that club member I got it from, he did a fantastic job growing nice trunk taper, really nice nebari on this tree. But the branches were just kind of thick, heavy, and didn't have a lot of taper. And I bought it knowing, wow, I'm gonna cut all the branches off and turn it into a shohin. So just about every single branch on the tree was cut off, flushed to the trunk. And the response of that, I've been working for now two years, and we're starting to get a really nice little silhouette kind of built up on here. So it still has a ways to go, but this will be a really nice kifu tree. Now, one important note about kifu versus shohin is this tree is eight inches tall. So it falls into the, it's at the limit, but it's right at eight inches or 20 centimeters. So this would technically, if height was the only standard, this would count as a shohin. But as Daisaku, our friend from Japan teaches us, who's a judge at Kafuten, it's feeling is more important than that magical number that we've come up with. And so because this trunk is so thick and the taper is so extreme, this has a more kifu feeling than a shohin feeling. And in fact, because nebari is so good, we're never really gonna be able to fit this into a proper shohin size pot. So while it will be an eight inch or 20 centimeter tree, it's kind of destined to be a great kifu that we can display with a far more directional tree, be it an exposed root pine or a nice dramatic juniper off to the side. So I guess there's limits to going from big to small. And then sometimes you have to go from small to big again. So it's just a whole journey to shohin and back. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of fun ways to explore in bonsai. And shohin is one thing that, some people, this is their only passion. They don't wanna have medium or large size trees. Shohin can be an all encompassing kind of art form. What do we have here? All right, the last of the developed trees that we're gonna share is a shohin princess persimmon. Princess persimmon is not a dwarf plant, but the fruits are much smaller. The fruits are dwarf, the growth is relatively normal. I got this tree. This was imported by Derek Delisi of Canada Bonsai who does legal importing from Japan to Canada and then legal importing from Canada to the United States. So I picked this tree out in Japan and went through Derek's process of Canada Bonsai of importing this legally. So yeah, this was a tree that I bought from Hirose, which is one of the top shohin artists in Japan. He's got that great shohin book, actually. Yeah, I think it's called the shohin handbook or something like that, or the bonsai handbook. But yeah, I bought this tree from his garden. I needed a strong directional tree. I needed a princess persimmon, so I bought this tree when I was in Japan. And I've since probably doubled the amount of twigs or branches that I have on here. I potted it in a really nice glazed pot. And yeah, it's a tree that in a few more years of branch work, we should be able to use pretty quickly. This tree was made by root cutting. And so rather than cutting a branch off and sticking it in a pot, it was a big gnarly root that had a lot of twists and movement and fun kind of power to it. I was wondering how we got here, because it's hard to imagine somebody wiring this, not because they couldn't, but because they just probably wouldn't. Yeah, yeah. Roots are the only ones that do really weird stuff. Yeah, and persimmons in general, it's hard to get trunk caliper when it's actually potted. So if you can get a really big root, you can save yourself a lot of effort by having that root kind of be nice and thick and heavy. So root cuttings are one of the best way to get persimmon bonsai. And so this little princess persimmon, I think it's got a red kind of oval shaped fruit, is just a great little tree to have in a showroom. Does a persimmon of this size produce a lot of fruit, single fruit? Yeah, this tree can with good technique and good fertilizing, I took a lot of them off this year so we can keep developing branches, but this tree can easily get 15 fruit, maybe even 20 fruit. So yeah, one of the nice things that we like using the princess persimmon is because that fruit is, it's about the size of an acorn, it's not too big. A normal persimmon is about the size of an apple, so it would never work for show heat, but the princess persimmon works quite nicely. And then we're gonna wrap up with kind of three young trees in development that I, some of them I recently got, some of them I've been growing. This is a Ilex serrata, a Japanese winterberry or deciduous holly. In this little tree I got, this was a tree that Eric has, I got from Eric Schrader of Bold Sci-Fi. Eric and I were discussing these trees about a year ago and he was sending me photos of all his Ilex serrata and I ended up picking up and tagging two of them about a year back and they just kind of sat down at his place until I was able to get down there and grab them. But he actually had so many that we were able to offer a workshop at the Schohin School and so we have four students who were able to get these as well and that means there should be about six more good Ilex serrata bonsai, Schohin bonsai popping up in the community somewhere soon. But yeah, I think Eric had this in a raised bed or the ground or something like that for a few years, got some really nice trunk mats and so while the branches are young, now I can just build off a really nice silhouette. So buying something that's nice and chunky and has some momentum to it, now I can use my technique and our technique here at Rakuyo to finish this off. It's kind of like it's taking an exit ramp off the freeway. Yeah. It's coming out of warp almost. That's right. Going into a slower speed. Yeah, so we'll probably get this into either a smaller training pot or a bonsai pot so we can really start to slow it down and yeah, the next three, four years, we'll start building some nice, beautiful twigs on that little guy. The next tree, one of my good friends grew. This is grown by Ed of Copper Creek Bonsai. This is a Japanese white pine. I believe he got a white pine, a rooted white pine, not rooted, but a white pine seedling from Julian Adams and so one of the nice things is this is white pine on its own roots. There's no graft anywhere on here. Not as we showed though, right? This is a regular. Not as we showed, just regular Japanese white pine. The needles are a little big. Again, it was grown. Ed grew this in the ground for several years to get some nice trunk mass and caliper. It's since been dug up from the ground. It went into a large training pot so having that energy from the ground, having the energy from the large training pot, the needles are quite big, but once we get this into a small bonsai pot, which we will this year, and with proper watering technique, we should be able to get those needles about half that size. Yeah, it's quite an achievement to get it out of Oregon field growing momentum and then slow it down enough. It's already starting to nicely reduce. Yeah, this tree. Compared to standard. Yeah, yeah, the needles are starting to get nicely reduced. We did one wiring on this tree already so it has a really nice kind of shape established. In fact, my friend Daisaku Nomoto did the wiring on this tree. I brought down several trees to work on before the show and he was kind enough to help me with a few of them while I was busy wiring that ume and a few of the other trees. But yeah, this one, it's a fantastic kind of pathway to be a nice top-of-the-box tree. In our Anatomy of a Shohin episode, we talked about the top-of-the-box trees mostly being black pines and they are about 95% of the time but you can also have an informal upright white pine or an informal upright juniper if you don't have a juniper outside the box. So having a few options that aren't black pines in the works is kind of really important for us to have a little bit more variety in the displays that we can make. The last tree that Maciek is grabbing is a tree that I've grown here from a cutting. We're gonna finish off with another Eliagnus or broadleaf evergreen. And this was a rooted cutting that I had made and have been growing ever since. We should probably just bring this one for comparison. Yeah, yeah. How far you can get. Yeah, so in this stage, we're in making branches stage and in this stage, we're on a make the trunk stage. So I have this huge ginormous sacrifice branch on here because my only goal at this stage, once I have a cutting that's rooted and wired some shape into it, is to get that trunk thicker so that eventually I can chop it down to nothing and build a nice little silhouette like this. Are you gonna wait till it gets that thick? Are you looking for that? Or are you gonna get within spitting distance of it? I actually want it thicker than the other one. So that's a little bit thin for me. So shooting a bit higher this time. Shooting a bit higher, yeah. Now that I have that tree, I can use that off to the side and that will slowly get bigger over time. This tree should really quickly get bigger because we have this strong sacrifice on here. So yeah, this is something that we have kind of cooking or marinating in the back of our grow area so that one day I can get that trunk three, four, five inches in diameter and jam it into a small shohin pot. Cool. Now leaf reduction is one of our favorite topics, I think, on this channel. Yeah. We've covered it quite a bit. We have. And you can see, I think this is a great example of, you have full confidence that we will get the leaves. I mean, just as small as the one we just showed. Even smaller, yeah. Even smaller. Yeah, you can see there are some small leaves on here. They're beginning to respond. The potential is there. And so with good technique, this is in kind of big tree, big thickness, big energy kind of mode. Once we start shifting it to small tree mode, once we get in a smaller pot, once we start defoliating this three, four times a year, I'm fully confident those leaves get smaller. You trust in the process. Trust the process, that's right. So yeah, that's our episode that we have for you today where we share about 15 small trees that we have in the works here at Rakuyo. If you're interested in learning about Shohin Display, we mentioned that Shohin Anatomy video series where we put together the different styles of Shohin Displays with five tree, four tree, three tree box stands and two tree displays known as Tokonoma Kazari. So check that out if you haven't seen it yet. But yeah, Shohin Bonsai is super fun. To me, it feels more fun and lighthearted than medium and large bonsai just because the pots are more colorful, the stands are more kind of interesting. You display trees in groups rather than individually. So it's just kind of a way to kind of play and have some trees that don't necessarily break your back when you're trying to move things around in the garden. I feel like display kind of engages a different part of the brain. It does. Shohin, at least, and kind of drives me to have interest in pottery and maybe species I've never considered before or even like styles. Yeah. It's kind of just a very inspirational form of art. Yeah, and importantly for Shohin in particular, with medium and large trees for display, we make a nice tree and then we kind of figure out how to display it and show it off. With Shohin, you kind of need to be thinking about bonsai display from the beginning because we do display these in groups with other trees and they have to have very specific functions within those groups to create contrast and to look beautiful. Yeah, if you follow those display videos we've made, then you might find that you already have some trees that will fit into that, but then you might find that there's gaps. And if you kind of follow the conventions of display, you will know what those gaps are. I need a broadleaf evergreen Shohin. Yeah, I need a tree with a strong direction or I need both. Or I need new pottery. I need specific pottery. Yeah, that's one thing that we've learned doing these Shohin schools is that a lot of the earth tone pots, which look great on medium and large bonsai, don't necessarily translate when you have a lot of small trees together kind of fighting for attention. The flashy pots, the painted pots, the pots with really active glazes tend to, or active colors, tend to show off a bit more. So Shohin is kind of its own little world in Japan. It's totally separate from the large bonsai community. They have their own association, their own professionals, their own shows, their own clubs. Arguably some distinct skill sets, I would say, too. Yeah, and very different skill sets. The compressed kind of nature of Shohin actually means that we design the trees a little bit differently than the big trees. So it's its own little world, and you can go really deep into that. And some people, like I said, kind of go kind of so deep that they don't want to play with anything else. And there's a lot of different ways to approach and do bonsai. All of it's fun. All of it's great. But Shohin is a great way to dive into something and really geek out. All right, you've been watching Rock For You's Deciduous Bonsai channel. I hope you learned about how Shohin are made and their origins. Check out that Anatomy of a Shohin series that we talked about. And if you have any questions, feel free to drop those in the comments section. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Andrew. I'm Ajit. And we will see you next time.