European spruce #5

The European spruce has many larger branches growing in many directions and it will be interesting to see which will stay and which will be turned into jins. The important thing, as with many of my collection at the moment, is to just keep it alive in this first year and then I can start to plan the styles later. Unfortunately this bonsai hobby requires a high level of patience to give time for your trees to recover from the various tasks that we perform year in year out. This is one of the reasons to have many trees if possible so you always have something ongoing.

European spruce #4

This spruce has more growth and the truck was a nice size. Once I can start to style these, hopefully next year, I hope to find hidden a nice bonsai. This is an art in itself trying to find the bonsai within a piece of material, either collected or purchased from a regular garden centre.

European spruce #3

I have already collected two European spruce trees (Picea abies) during the spring this year and couldn't stop myself from going back to the same area and seeing what other potential bonsai were hiding on the side of the road. I managed to find three more that have had the same treatment of being trimmed year on year by the verge cutter.

This spruce I like for the lack of growth. It sounds funny to say but the style of the tree is already heading in a clear direction and the broken branches will make for some good jins.

European spruce

Spring soon came and went and because of other commitments I didn’t do all that I wanted to do to my collection of bonsai trees. I have also not posted anywhere as many posts to my blog has I had planned, but hopefully now I can get back on track and start to spend more time on my own bonsai collection. Even though I was busy with other things I still found time to search for some yamadora to add to my collection. I wrote last year of a great source for some potential bonsai material and these could be found on the roadside verges. From this exact type of location I managed to find two or three pieces of material that could turn into a good bonsai. To my surprise two of the pieces I came across were European spruce (Picea abies) that have been repeatedly cut by the verge cutter, which has resulted in thick trunks to form but the height has remained low.


I potted the trees into ‘training’ pots but I could have put them straight into a normal bonsai pot because the main roots were near to the surface. I also potted them into a new bonsai soil mix I am starting to use. This material is lighter than the cat litter I have been using and the dark brown colour looks better than the lighter colour of cat litter especially when it starts to dry. I mixed about 10% pine bark as spruce like a drier soil mix. This type of soil needs real commitment each day because the soil can dry very quickly, especially with the hot temperatures we have been having here in Finland the last week or so. I am watering my bonsai daily and feeding every 10 days. You can see from the one spruce that this is already working well.

You can see clearly in the photo below the effects that the verge cutter had on the tree with the top completely horizontal. With some removal of certain branches and shaping of others then this has excellent potential because the main trunk is already quite thick and does not need any work.

I will continue to water and feed this year and allow the trees to grow freely and then next year I will start to shape the trees.