Happy Bonsai: Choose It, Shape It, Love It, Hardcover

Busting myths and making bonsai accessible to everyone, Happy Bonsai will make you fall in love with this most meditative of garden crafts.

Do you know your shari from your nebari? Can you tell a raft display from a semi-cascade? Do bonsai grow better indoors or out? When is the best time to prune? How do you create that windswept look? Happy Bonsai has all the answers, plus expert tips such as why pruning roots is just as important as pruning branches.

Forty tree profiles provide easy-to-follow growing information, with both day-to-day and seasonal care advice, along with ideas and tips for how to shape and display. Specialty techniques--such as repotting, wire training branches, defoliating, and root and branch pruning--are explained with illustrations for each stage of the process. Techniques are then put into practice with demonstrations of how to achieve the main types of bonsai display, from an informal upright specimen to a forest group or root-over-rock display.

Michael Tran has practiced bonsai for more than 13 years, studying under Udo Fischer, one of the most senior bonsai masters of Europe, as well as several Japanese masters. In 2009 he established the Minoru Bonsai tree nursery near the German town of Heidelberg, where he also teaches bonsai courses for beginners. He is the founder and organizer of the annual Generation Bonsai festival, which brings together top bonsai masters from around the world.