Choosing And Caring For Your Bald Cypress Bonsai Tree
The ancient art of Bonsai is the practice of growing normal-sized trees and plants on a miniature scale. Bonsai enthusiasts enjoy hours of culture and cultivation, controlling the amount and quality of the daylight their plants receive and carefully pruning roots and branches to maintain the plant's tiny scale.
Certain plants are better suited than others to the rigors of Bonsai. The Bald Cypress Bonsai is one of the most popular Bonsai trees, prized for the way it forces new leaf buds out along the bare trunk after the trunk has been cut.
Beginner's Bonsai
The Bald Cypress Bonsai tree is an excellent tree for someone who is just getting started in the art of Bonsai, because it is so easy to grow. If you live in the southern United States, you will find the Bald Cypress Bonsai growing prolifically in great numbers outdoors, and you can probably find an outdoor specimen to bring indoors and train. If you do not have access to these quantities of Bald Cypress Bonsai, you should be able to find a specimen at your local nursery, or order one from a Bonsai supplier.
When converting an outdoor specimen into a Bonsai tree, bear in mind the Bonsai rule of scale: the height of the tree should be approximately six times the width of the base of the tree. This rule will result in your cutting a great deal of your top growth off, but be bold. The tree will grow back in true Bonsai style.
Bald Cypress Bonsai trees are frequently planted in groups in a single container to form a "Bonsai forest." If you decide to build a forest, remember to work in odd numbers, forming your forest from groups of three, five, seven, nine, or eleven individual trees.
Caring For Your Bald Cypress Bonsai
Your Bald Cypress Bonsai likes wet soil, almost on the swampy side. Water the tree overhead to simulate rain falling from above, and fill the pot almost to the rim with water. During the summer, you may have to water your Bald Cypress bonsai twice a day.
This Bonsai tree likes full sun and, like most Bonsai trees, it prefers to live outdoors. Fertilize your tree once a week during the springtime, tapering off to once every two weeks during the late spring and fall. Hold off on the fertilizer as fall gives way to winter, so your Bald Cypress Bonsai tree can go dormant until next spring.
