The Metamorphosis of an Old Privet Stump: A Westerner's Pure-Technique Bonsai Creation

In Europe there is an active group of bonsai artists, and these people are pure technicians, creating bonsai entirely through human creativity.

Take this privet, for example: so many trunks, yet the stump base is really quite good, around ten trunks, but they grow too compactly, making it inconvenient to style directly. Even to make it into a multi-trunk clump style, some would need to be removed to achieve a balance of sparse and dense. Such a stump can also be made to satisfy humanity's twisted aesthetic tastes through deadwood carving, and Westerners love doing this.

In 2009, the bonsai artist's friend dug it up.

Before long, a bonsai artist was brought in to saw its branches down to just one.

With so many saw cuts, making them all grow into horse-eye callus scars to conceal the flaws is nearly impossible; the only path left is carving. (August 2009)

By the following spring, it began to regrow. This stump is actually very large, and together with the soil in the box, it takes two or three people to move it.

After 8 months of growth, the bonsai artist felt the tree no longer needed to be in such a large pot, so after discussing it with its owner, he prepared to move it to a smaller pot.

So the roots were cleaned up, removing what needed to be removed

Then it was successfully stuffed into such a cramped little box

And then it lived happily in this little box

Before long it was April 2015, and the bonsai artist simply could not stand it anymore, so he took drastic measures. After two weeks of intense work, the tree was finally made so unrecognizable that even its own mother wouldn't know it. Humans are truly strange: they all want to make themselves look younger and younger, yet for a tree they hope it turns white-haired overnight and withers in an instant.

Our bonsai artists in the Celestial Empire approach bonsai as working with the material's nature, so at least you can still see traces of its former self, whereas this pure-technique style of Westerners can almost be called creating something out of nothing. However, if such a bonsai is grown for two or three years and allowed to naturally oxidize for a period, it looks really quite good, almost able to pass for the real thing.