The Most Beautiful Bonsai Forest Plantings

It’s no secret that my favorite type of bonsai planting is a forest planting.  They are absolutely unmatched in giving the viewer a full perspective on a natural landscape, in miniature form. Beautiful bonsai forest trees are a sight to behold...

They’re also the most difficult bonsai planting to make.  You have to get all of the roots trimmed just right, and make sure everything fits nice and snug with enough balance to make sure one tree doesn’t kill another one under ground.

Not impossible, but not easy.

Then, there’s the actual pot itself.  Forests generally don’t look as cool if they’re in a deeper bonsai pot.  It makes it look too artificial in a deep container like that.

The trick is to use an extremely shallow and wide pot with the soil and rootball mounded up on it.  This isn’t much different from potting any other bonsai, but it’s definitely more difficult.  You just need a finer touch, and more precision with everything you do.

There’s also the shaping.  You have to shape and prune a forest planting just so to make it look natural.  If you’re going for something wild and weird, that’s fine too - but I like forests to look like nature, and that’s just not easy to do.  Nature doesn’t go for “pretty” — It goes for “efficient.”

So to shape a forest bonsai planting, you have to make it look like everything grew that way.  You have to visually see the competition amongst the trees.  Fighting for the most sunlight, fighting for enough space.  Just fighting to survive among each other.

The care is about the same as any other bonsai, which is nice.  You just have to make sure each individual bonsai tree in the forest is getting enough light, food and water to be happy.  If your watering is on point, your light is perfect and you’re feeding your trees appropriately, there’s nothing to worry about here.

But even though they’re pretty straight foreword to care for, forest bonsais are difficult to create.

That’s why I love a good forest planting.  There’s balance in all that chaos.  There’s elegance in that natural efficiency.

And while, like all art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there are some forest bonsai’s that are undoubtably better than the rest.

They’re full of balance, elegance, natural beauty and show the passion of an artist that has great care in their craft.

So today I wanted to showcase a few of my all-time favorite forest bonsai plantings. 

Each of them is, in my eyes, completely marvelous (in the truest sense of the word:  They force me to marvel in all their glory.)  They are balanced, they are natural and they are elegant.

Enjoy!