Bonsai creation takes time and patience; beginners must not dive in blindly.

Bonsai is one of the outstanding traditional arts of the Chinese nation. Using plants, rocks, soil, water and other materials, through artistic creation and horticultural cultivation, it typically and intensively recreates the beautiful scenery of nature in a pot, achieving the artistic effect of shrinking a dragon to the size of an inch and seeing the vast in the small, while also expressing feelings through the scenery and conveying a profound artistic conception, like a three-dimensional landscape painting.

Bonsai is an art that cannot be achieved overnight, but rather needs a very long time to refine and perfect. Bonsai makers generally need to have a calm state of mind. And the spirit of bonsai is often reflected right here: in making bonsai you must immerse yourself, lose yourself in it, and be steeped in it, so that you can persist and experience the joy of creation.

The artistic image expressed by bonsai must be a natural landscape; this is the fundamental characteristic that distinguishes bonsai from potted plants. Bonsai is a potted plant that has undergone artistic processing. Bonsai emphasizes the word "scene": it uses potted plants to express a certain landscape, thereby expressing the beauty of a painted scene and the beauty of artistic conception. Potted plants only express the natural beauty of the plant itself, and their beauty is no different from when grown in the ground.

For bonsai practitioners, the ordeal of time is a kind of character and a kind of cultivation. Restlessness of mind is a great taboo in bonsai making -- because thoughts determine actions, and thoughts are the compass of the direction of your behavior; bonsai hobbyists and makers must remember this.