Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Bonsai Works

Episode Date: February 8, 2020

For thousands of years people have been taking normal trees and forcing them into miniature. Learn all about the history and art of this strangely engrossing pastime in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everyone, welcome to a Saturday Selects episode. Charles W. Chuck Bryant here, and this is my week to pick, and I'm going with how Bonsai works. We love those little trees, we love the karate kid. All those things wrapped up make Bonsai.

May 16th, 2016 is when we first recorded this, and I think Josh and I both promised to get into Bonsai since then. Speaking for myself, I have not. But you never know, I did get tiny scissors for wearing those here, so maybe I'll use those. Check it out right now. Welcome to Step You Should Know,

a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We've decided to talk about 85% speed right now. Oh yeah? How's it going? Well you know, there are some weirdos that listen to us on double speed.

Well they just hurry up and get to the point you idiots. Yeah, cause they have busy lives, they can't listen to 40 minutes of content straight. It always, it's funny to me when somebody tweets to us, or it takes time to write an email. Say like, I love your podcast, but I'm really displeased with the tangents you go on. Oh sure.

You seem to talk about a lot of stuff that's unrelated. Can you stop doing that? Yeah. And I always think, I don't think Step You Should Know is for you buddy. Yeah. If you're being driven crazy by that, then. Well sure.

Yeah. Like we would welcome you to stay. Sure. But the tangents are part of the fabric of the show at this point. There's the glue. Like it or not. I think the whole thing would be

decidedly less enjoyable. If we were just like vomiting facts up. Yeah, just business like you know. Yeah. Or maybe after 850 shows, we should just completely change how we do it. Yeah, there you go. That's a great idea.

Yeah. Hey, before we get started though, we do want to thank Sam from Gypsons Mallort. Oh yeah, yeah. Thank you, Sam. We mentioned the unique LaCour, Chicago brand LaCour on our PR show. Right, right.

Live in Chicago. Cause you tried it like before the show. Yeah. Well, I tried it a few times. Oh, okay. It's, you know, as John Hodgman said, it tastes like a pencil shavings and heartbreak. This is descriptor.

But Sam Hurd is talking about Crown Royal. I was like, wait a minute. They talked about Mallort and I didn't send him anything. Yeah. Attention all of their distillers in America. You can get in on this too. Yeah. If the makers of Plymouth Gin or Leopold's Gin.

Or Knob Creek or Pappy Van Winkle. St. George's, they're a great distillery out of San Francisco. Yeah. Pappy Van Winkle, wow. That's the stuff that gets like hijacked and sold for like $20,000 on the internet. Yeah. So I'm just throwing it out there.

I'm picking it back up, bringing it back here, throwing it again. We're happy to drink your booze and talk about it. Ad nauseam. You know what else we're happy to talk about, big boy. What's that? Bonza. Yes, which you, I don't know if I was saying it wrong,

but right before we press record, you said, it's not bonsai, it's bonsai. And I was like, what's the death? It's not bonsai. Oh, the Z. Right. That means. Heads up.

Right, right, right. Bonsai, or bonsai. With an S. Right. Is, it basically means plant in tiny container. Yeah, those are the cute toy trees. Yeah. That Mr. Miyagi.

Are made of plastic. It depends. Target has some. They definitely are plastic ones. Yeah, if you search bonsai, it's one of the things that comes up immediately. Fake trees. I think it's called like nearly real.

Oh boy. Or nearly natural, something like that. And it does not look nearly natural. It's like near beer. You ever heard people call, non-alcoholic beer near beer? Yeah. I think it's kind of funny.

I used to, I probably shouldn't tell a story. So with bonsai, Chuck, we're talking, like you said, the little toy trees. And yeah, there's plenty of fake bonsai out there, but they're just kind of, it's the same thing as fake flowers, you know? Well, it sort of flies in the face of what's special about bonsai,

which is that it's a living work of art. Right, it does. And a lot of people are like, well, that's just a weird freakish tree that you've been abusing for the last several decades. Some people actually do criticize bonsai because it is, yeah, it's like docking a dog's tail. It's nothing like that.

But depending on how you feel about plants, it's the same thing. You're taking something that's natural and literally bending it to your will. So there's an anti pruning movement going on around the world? Maybe. I don't know if I would go that far to say it,

but if you are invested in bonsai, if you do appreciate bonsai, part of the whole point of bonsai is you are taking, you're creating a tableau that is a living depiction of nature. Yes. Rather than a painting, you're creating a living version of basically a painting.

Yeah, well, sculpture, living sculpture. Yeah, that's even better. Like you could make it out of sculpey clay. You could, but then you've totally missed the point of bonsai. Well, that'd be fun too, but... But it's something different, right? Yes, absolutely.

So we're gonna talk about how to bonsai. I have to say... Is that a verb as well? It is now. Oh, okay. We're gonna, Jerry's just cracking up this episode. She's reading a crack. Oh, I see, I got it.

What is the guy from Crack's name? Alfred E. Newman's like kind of... Oh yeah, he had like this blonde hair. Yeah, counterpart. Is that still around? Because they're sort of a different thing than they used to be. Oh, totally.

Yeah, there's this great story behind Crack. Like Crack was around for decades and it just got left to languish. And I guess some fan came along and was like, hey, I noticed like you're basically just waiting around for Crack to die. Can I have a stab at it? A crack at it?

I specifically didn't say that, but yes. And they're like, whatever, kid, go ahead. And the guy basically resurrected Crack in his basement. Nice. Brought it back from the dead and now it's like huge. Well, they just sold for a boatload of money. Oh yeah. Good for them.

I hope it went to that dude who resurrected it. I do too. That's great. I don't remember how we got on to Crack. Jerry was laughing. Oh, she was reading Crack, that's right. So back to Banzai, like I said, we're gonna talk about how to Banzai,

which like you said is a verb now. But let's talk about the history of it first. Yeah, like many things in the world and especially many things that you might associate with Japan, it started earlier in China before it made its way to Japan. And in China, it was called, well, in Japan, did you already say what it literally means?

I think you did. Yeah, it means plant in a tray. Yeah, plant in a tray. In China, it was punsai, which means tray plant, not too far off. No. And if you go all the way back to the Tang dynasty, they, there is evidence on tomb paintings

that they had these little prune trees and shallow pots. Yeah, it's just like part of the painting in the tomb. It's not like featured, it's just part of it. Yeah. Kind of depicting regular life. They're like, okay, well, at least by 706 CE, that there were people doing Banzai in China. That's right.

Or punsai. Yes. Right? And may go back even further than that. There's a legend that an emperor around about 206 BCE wanted his entire empire, China, recreated in miniature in his backyard. And they think they suspect that it's possible

that that may have given rise to punsai. That makes sense. Yeah. You're like, we got to make tiny trees now because the emperor wants a toy. Yeah. Yeah. But then either through trade or through gifts,

exchanges of state departments and stuff like that. Right. Japan does what it always did and it got its hand on something and then took it to the nth degree and perfected it. It made it awesome. That's what Japan does. That's what they do.

There's an ancient Japanese scroll that I found, not literally, in my backyard. In your attic. That I found on the internet. And it says, this is around the Kamakura period, which was 1185 to 1333. And it says, to appreciate and find pleasure in curiously curved potted trees is to love deformity,

which I thought was interesting. And the article I read said it, we don't know whether this is positive or negative. Right, yeah. That means positive. Maybe the writer was passive aggressive. Maybe. I thought it was a pretty interesting quote though.

Oh yeah, for sure. Because I mean, again, you're training trees to be little freaks of nature, basically. Yeah. And like a lot of other works of art at the time, it starts out with monks and Buddhists. And then eventually it becomes part of the rich elite. And then eventually works its way to the common folk.

Right. So by the, I think the 13th, 15th, 16th century, it was somewhere, yeah, it had become like a pretty well-established hobby in Japan. I got the impression that it wasn't necessarily thought of as an art form until the West saw it for the first time. So in the 17th century, Japan was getting really tired of Westerners

trying to convert them to Christianity and basically exploiting them in unfair trade practices. So they said, you know what, Westerners, get out. We are isolating ourselves. We're closing ourselves off to trade with the West, except for a few Dutch and Spaniards and then the Chinese. Everybody else go away. And they stayed like that for a couple hundred years.

And I believe it was Millard Fillmore who sent Matthew Perry, Chandler Bing, over there with the squadron of Navy freighters and huge cannons and guns saying, you're gonna trade with us. He said, could you guys be any cooler? You have all kinds of cool stuff. That's my Chandler. So Japan opened up basically at the barrel of America's guns.

Yeah, we should do a show on that. We've talked about it enough. It's really interesting, the isolationist period. Yeah. Like what was, what went on there then? A lot of, a lot of bonsai, a lot of goldfish tending. Nice. Mr. Burns' famous quote,

those sandal wearing goldfish tenders. I don't remember that. That's good though. But as far as coming to the West, there were a couple of big fairs where it kind of exploded. The Paris World Exhibition of 1878 and the London Exhibition of 1989, where, of course people in the West

just probably flipped for it. Yeah. Because it's so cool. Yeah. It is like. Oh man, researching this. I just, every time I would come across a new term for like a style or something,

I'd go look it up and I'd end up spending a half an hour just looking at bonsai pictures. Yeah, me too. You know, it's really engrossing. Yeah, I was gonna be like, all right, I'm doing this. I definitely am. But I'm gonna wait. For what?

Old age. So like three or four years from now. Yeah, I think I'm going to get into it. Yeah, I think it's just for me, I've got too much going on right now to do, but it's gonna be a great retirement pastime for me. Yeah. I could just, I could see myself really like

spending days and days. I can see it too. Caring for these little guys. Cause I like, oh yeah. And I like tiny things and miniatures. Oh, you're gonna love bonsai. Yeah, like the little tiny Tabasco bottles that you get in room service and stuff like that.

Plus you're crazy for it. Your doll houses that you've built. Oh, my doll houses, yeah. Yeah, I just, I don't know. Have you ever read the doll house, the Heinrich Gibson play? Yeah, sure. It's great. All right, well, I guess we should talk

about some of those styles then, huh? Well, you want to take a break first? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. Okay. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. And so tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Josh, you mentioned styles and I did the same thing you did, buddy.

I went and looked at pictures and I put little marks next to my favorite ones, like earmarked what I'm going to try and emulate in the future. I'm very curious if we're going to do the same ones. Yeah, me too. All right. You start. So upright, chocon. Uh-huh.

And it's the most formal, traditional style where it is basically, it emulates a strong, healthy, upright growing tree. Yeah. I love that we take this like ancient, amazing art form and the most formal style, we go meh, meh. Yeah. But I agree. Didn't delight me.

Again, what you're doing is emulating nature, but you're doing it in miniature and part of bonsai is using like tricks of the eye, force perspective, that kind of stuff. And the upright, the chocon style does that by tapering the trunk. So it's much wider at the bottom than it is at the top to kind of give you the idea that you're looking up toward a very tall tree. Yeah. And we'll sprinkle in bits of the sort of philosophical art behind it, but the idea is that you sort of imagine a scene in your head and then you try and make it look like

that. Maybe it's something from your past. Maybe it's a great tree you saw one time on a vacation, but just something that makes you feel good. Right. You're usually not like, you know, let me just make some crazy weird looking thing because you know, I'm drunk. Or I'm going to make that tree that was next to the place where my friend got hit and killed

on his bike. No. It's all about harmony. Yes. That would be the opposite of bonsai. Yes. That's right. So moving on to another style, which I did not put a check mark next to, but it's okay.

Mayogi. I like this one. It's okay. It's a little like the chocon. It's the informal upright. Okay. So a little more style maybe. Yeah.

The chocon is very formal, very straight. The mayogi is, it's overall the shape is upright, but it can like bend and twist to get to that point. You see what I'm saying? Sure. It's neat. Yeah. I think it's neat.

I wouldn't mind doing a mayogi at some point in the future, but it definitely won't be the first one I try. All right. It's down the list a bit. Yeah. It is. The slanting, shakan or. Shaka-kan.

Or Fukenagashi. Fukenagashi. Yeah. Nice. Is that good? Yes. These are pretty cool. I have to say.

That has the leaning trunk at a 45 degree angle and the branches follow the angle of the trunk. Yeah. They're parallel to it, right? Yes. Basically parallel essentially. Right. So they're neat looking.

Yeah. And that trunk is slanted in reference to the pot, the lip of the pot, right? Yeah. That 45 degrees. Right. And we should say, we haven't said it, so we're talking mostly about the trees and that's what gets the most attention. Yeah.

But classically and at its heart, bonsai is a balance, it's a harmony between the plant and the pot. Yeah. Like when you're talking about a bonsai, the pot is included in that. Yeah. It's a part of it. It's a part of it. The sculpture itself almost.

Yeah. Agreed. And also with that slanting style, supposedly, even though I saw many examples to the contrary, the first branch is supposed to go opposite of the angle of the trunk to provide balance. Right. I think that's in the shagon style. Oh, really? The shagon.

It goes the opposite. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. All right. All right. Chuck, next. Cascade.

Pretty neat. And you just lit up like a Christmas tree. Is this yours? So the semi-cascade, the Han Ken guy is mine. That's the one I'm going to try first. All right. Well, go ahead and describe it then. Basically, and you need a deeper pot, so most pots for bonsai are shallow.

This you need like a pretty deep pot for because the plant is basically mostly overhanging. It's outside and hanging down from the pot. That's a full-on cascade. And these are meant to really emulate like a tree that's just barely hanging on and like a rocky outcrop on a mountain. Interesting. So the cascade is full-on like basically the whole plant is below the lip of the pot. Yes.

The semi-cascade is where- The Han Ken guy. Right. Yeah. Where there's a substantial amount of the plant is still in the pot, but it's growing over and down the side some. That's right. Or really off to the side. Wind swept is semi-cascade, I think is another term for it.

Yeah. Now I'm trying to apply psychology to why that's your favorite. I just the look of it. Just aesthetically speaking, I think it's great. Next up we have the literati or the bunjin or bunjini, bunjingi? I don't know. Bunjingai. Yeah.

I think that's way better probably. Or gi. Bunjingi. One of those. You think I would ask my wife? Sure. You know. We should just have you me in here with like a ruler smashing our knuckles.

Nope. Okay. This is the one that's really focuses on perspective. So the idea here is that you're looking from below to a tree that is above. Like if you're at the base of a mountain looking up, then you tailor the tree to make it look as if, and we should also mention that you should look at eye level is traditionally where you're, when you talk about perspective, if you're standing four feet above it, that's different.

You should look at bansai eye level. Yeah. That's why they're so frequently displayed at eye level. That's right. Yeah. And there's also probably worth mentioning here that there's a definite front and a definite back to a bansai. We'll get into that.

This one is one of my favorites. Broom? Yes. We are at the broom. So is this the one that you marked? The Hokidachi. Yes. Okay.

And you might look it up people and say, huh, interesting. Not the most flashy tree, but there's something about it, man. It has this like really full kind of half dome with just a single trunk jutting up. Yeah. It's just beautiful to me. It's like, it takes the shape of like an idealized like maple or oak tree. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. It reminded me of a, like a grand oak. Yeah. We can call you flashy. You've never been known to wear like ID bracelets or pinky rings or- I don't know what either one of those things are. You know what a pinky ring is? Nope.

Yes, you do. I don't know what you're talking about. A pinky ring. A man's pinky ring. I don't know what a man is. Okay. I'll show you later. So next up is my absolute favorite by far, the landscape.

It's when you create your little miniature scene. It's like a shadow box, which I used to love doing those when I was a kid. My oldest sister was into this years and years ago. She would make more like English gardens kind of a miniature. I love that. With like, you know, with like those gazing balls, she would make like, well, a tiny one of those. Oh yeah.

The focal point of the place. Yeah. So this is when you have your little nature scene. You got moss. You got little rocks. You may even have a water feature. And it's just, I just, I don't know, man, ever since I was a kid, I love little things like that.

So is that the first one you're going to try? Well, I think I'll probably have to work up to that. Okay. You're not going to just do water features right out of the gate. No, but I might. I built my own fountain once. It's not that hard. Okay.

You just need a pump. Nice. And this actually, China is still into, yeah, into Banzai, but this is the stuff that they practice called penge. Oh, really? Yeah. Very landscape oriented. Yeah.

I might even put a little, like a camping scene, a little firing. Oh, that'd be great. With some little guys with their acoustic guitars. Right. Jason Voorhees is standing off to the side, just watching them. Maybe. Root over or root on rock. This is the one I thought was going to be your favorite.

Yeah. So what's the deal here? You could definitely combine this one with something like Cascade or windswept. It's where you train the roots of the tree to grow around or on top of a rock. It's pretty neat. It looks like it is really clinging to a mountainside. Yeah. And what they're trying to do in a lot of these cases is give the appearance of like

an old tree. You're right. Something that's been around for many years, when in fact it may be a tree that's like a year old, but it looks like some ancient oak or something. Yeah. And we'll talk about some of the techniques for doing that later, but that is largely the, it seems like the initial point. Yeah.

If you're trying to make it look like an old tree or you're creating a tree that you intend to live for a few hundred years and get old. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And the oldest one they have in DC, like 400 years old. That's not even close. Oh, really?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that one's cool. You want to talk about that? Sure. So there's a white pine at the National Banzai and Penging Museum in DC. And it's almost 400 years old, but also notably it survived a pretty big event, the bombing of Puyo Rishima.

Yeah. And then it was given as a gift from Japan to the U.S. Why? I don't know. I guess they were like, don't ever do that again. Yeah. Just take this thing to remind you, think twice. Right.

So there are many, many older ones in that, though, is what you're saying. Yeah. There's one in a museum in Spain. It's a ficus. It's like a thousand years old. Wow. There's another one that's like a thousand. There's a couple that are 800 years old.

And the idea is that many times these are passed within your family, correct? Yeah. And very frequently, they'll be handed down as heirlooms, right? That's awesome. Now, some of the disparity between ages where they're like, that one doesn't really count. It may have been like a thousand-year-old ficus that somebody found out in the wild and collected and has been bondying for 20 years. Right, right.

So this one, I have the impression, has been bondied and in the same family for like six or seven generations. So it's been like tended to. So it may have been kind of old when it was collected. But it's been bondied for hundreds of years. Amazing. All right. To finish up, the last category, which I think is pretty cool, multi-form, or Ikada,

or Sokan, or Kabudachi. And that is when you have the illusion that you have more than one tree, but it's really just one tree. Yeah, that's neat. It's pretty cool. So it looks like, you know, it's generally jutting out from the bottom, obviously, of the root structure up, and it looks like a couple of trees. Yeah.

It's just a single tree. Some people cheat and put several trees in there, but. Well, you can do that, right? A little, your own little forest. I guess so, but isn't that then really the landscape, the Saikai? Maybe. I think, you know, what are the Bonsai police going to come knocking on your door? Yeah.

You don't want to mess with those guys. No, you don't. They'll ignore you. All right. Let's talk a little bit about what kind of plants you can use, because I did not know this. There was a special kind of tree that everybody used to make a Bonsai, but in fact, it could be a tree that out in the wild is 30 feet tall.

I had no idea. I thought they were little miniature trees that just grew up to be like a foot tall. Yeah. No, apparently that's like a common misconception. I saw that during research a couple of times. The whole key is you are dwarfing a tree, and you're doing that by keeping it in a small container and keeping its roots trimmed back so that it comes to basically go against its natural processes and just stays small and miniature, but yeah, basically any plant can

be Bonsai'd. Crazy. It is, and what I didn't realize is that most Bonsai is meant to be outdoors. I didn't either. I thought it was strictly indoor. Yeah. There are indoor varieties. You can take indoor plants or plants that do well indoors and make them Bonsai, and that's

becoming more of a thing, but for the most part, if you're doing especially something with a pine or a deciduous tree or a juniper, those are outdoor plants, and your Bonsai is meant to stay outdoors except if you bring it in and use it as a centerpiece or something once in a while. For those trees, it makes a point in here that they have a natural yearly cycle that will be disrupted if you keep it indoors. You may have to overwinter it to a certain degree, but you're also going to want to take these out in the winter some, but it also says that it's not like a grown tree that's

covered in mulch and super deep rooted, so you can't just leave it out all winter. If you do, you would want to leave it in a cold frame or a greenhouse or something like that where it's going to survive. You could also protect it with a bunch of mulch, too, if you leave it outside. It does follow a lot of its natural processes. If you're doing a fruiting tree or a flowering tree, as long as it's healthy and happy, it's going to bear fruit. There's going to be flowers.

Pretty cool. Yeah, it's very cool, but you are simulating nature in that the roots are being kept shallow and trimmed, so you have to take that into consideration by protecting it from cold and from making sure it has a lot of water, too. Yeah, we'll get into the specifics of care here in a minute. You said you can pretty much use any tree. Ideally what you want to use is some sort of tree or shrub that have small leaves or needles and that can get super dense, so you just have sort of more material to work with

for your art form. Right. Yeah. I think it's wonderful. It all starts with the roots, right? Yeah. When you're looking for a specimen, you can just go to your local nursery. Some people grow stuff from seed.

You can also take cuttings and grow them in rooting hormone or something like that. Man, if you start from seed, that's like- That's neat. That's dedication. Sure. I will also say that if you start with a kit that has a bonsai already sort of shaped for you, that's fine, I'm not going to knock it too much because you might not have time and you might still want to tinker with it.

That's a good point. But I would recommend to get your full experience and maybe start with a cutting that you kind of grow as your own little baby. Right. Or you can go to a nursery or something like that and just say, I would like to buy this plant and I'm going to turn it into a bonsai. True. That definitely counts as well.

Yeah. A really good one to start with that I found is a juniper. Most junipers, they grow as ground covers, so they stay fairly low to the ground normally. They do well being miniaturized. They're also pretty hardy plants from what I understand, and they grow really well in any temperate climate, relatively temperate climate. You go to a nursery and you want to kind of go already with the style in mind that you're going to go with, whether it's broom or whether it's a windswept or semi-cascade or whatever.

Because then you'll be able to kind of narrow down the plant that you want to buy because it's already going to, you're almost seeing it in there, how sculptors say that they look at a piece of marble and they're just chipping away from what was already in there all along. It's very similar with bonsai as well. You go in, you find the plant that kind of suits your needs a little bit, and then yeah, you dig down and you want to find the first roots that come off of the trunk. That's what's called the crown, right? That's right.

As long as those are pretty healthy looking and intact, it's probably a pretty good bet that you can turn that thing into a bonsai. That's right, and you should remember too that the more you want to alter the tree, the probably younger and smaller it should be to begin with, because you can only do so much. You can't take a tree that's like stick straight and be like, all right, now I want it to cascade all the way back down. Yeah, you might be able to, but it would take decades to get it to grow like that.

I would say you'd have to be a bonsai master in order to do that. Again, like Mr. Miyagi. But these exposed roots, it's going to give the appearance if you want to have that age look like it's an ancient tree, maybe. Ancient trees usually have these great big roots that you see sort of on top of the ground. Right, exactly. So that's a neat thing you can do with your bonsai. Yep, plus also what's great, when you dig down to those top roots that form the crown

where the trunk ends and the real roots begin, there's going to be plenty of feeder roots above that, and you're actually going to want to trim those away. But it gives what was once a pretty short plant suddenly has a trunk now, and you're like, oh, okay, wow, I see where this is coming from. It's starting to take shape just right out of the gate. Yeah, and what you're doing, I mean, we'll talk about pruning in a bit, but how you're shaping this is with wire, either with like aluminum or copper wiring that you can leave on to bend the tree to your will to like a year, but you want to be careful and not

make it too tight because it can actually cut into the tree. But you don't want it all, and so you keep it on your wiring, and the idea is that again with harmony, you don't want branches, a mess of branches obscuring one another. You want each branch to have sort of its own personality. Exactly. Yeah. So you want to talk about how to start a bonsai? Let's.

Okay. So you go in, you find your plant, and by the way, we're going to kind of give you a step-by-step, but I found a really good website called bonsaiforbeginners.com. And they have a really, really good, really well written, even though there's lots of misspelled words, but just it's really understandable. Is four the number four? That's like F-O-R-E. Oh.

No, bonsai for beginners. Wow. Yeah. I don't remember if it is the number four. I don't think it is. Okay. Just look it up. So if you're from New Zealand writing, you found the right one, but they basically have

a great step-by-step of how to do it. All right. So you want to buy a tree. A good time of the year to do this is to go in the spring when the growing cycle begins and go to your nursery. And like you said, you're looking for whatever tree that fits your mind's eye of what you eventually want. And it says in here to start with your scene and work toward that.

I think I would be more inclined to sort of reform it a little bit over the years, which I'm sure is fine. You're going to be the bad boy of the bonsai world, aren't you? Maybe so. You never know what I'm going to do next. Show up to exhibitions wearing like a motorcycle jacket. Possibly. So the price is going to vary depending on what kind of tree you're getting.

And of course, I looked up the kits. They can be 50 to a couple of hundred bucks depending on the kind of tree and how finished looking it is. Or, I mean, you can go spend 10 to 20 on say like a juniper and then there are plenty of bonsai tools that you can buy. The internet will be happy to take your money for that. But you can also make do with other stuff like florist's wire. You can get the copper wire you need from probably a hardware store.

Yeah, pliers. Yeah, pliers. Scissors. Scissors. Smaller the better. Sure. Like those little first grade scissors. Exactly.

Round ends. Right. And then you are also going to want like a root rake, which you can just bend a fork and bam, you got a root rake. Boom. So you've got your plant or where you're saying it's a juniper. You're going to dig down, you're going to basically take it out, put it on the table in front of you.

You want a spray bottle of water. You're going to take a shot of sake. Right. Get started. Traditionally. Exactly. Yeah, and then you get started. So you take the dirt off of the top layer all the way down to the crown.

And again, there's a bunch of feeder roots, which you want to trim from the trunk itself. And then you take a look at the roots, like you scrapes the dirt away and you really look at the root structure and you say, I got to get rid of a lot of this. Yeah. And you should already have your pot at this point, by the way, because this is the first step is the potting. Right. And I've seen people, especially beginners, make the mistake when they're first creating

a bonsai, that they go real small with the pot. You're going to go through a couple of pots in the first few years. So they say, don't be afraid to use a big pot. As a matter of fact, you should probably use a bigger pot than you think you should for its first pots. Eventually, three or four years down the road, you're going to finally come to that one pot that this thing stays in for the rest of its life and you're going to repot it every couple of years, but you're going to repot it in the same pot.

Yeah. You're going to be a flea market and there's going to be a golden light shining around this one pot. Yeah. And you're going to say, that thing's $20. And James Brown's going to be like, do you see the light? And then you'll talk them down to $14 and then up to $17 and then you'll meet at the middle at $15.

Nice. And then you've got your pot. That'll be a great day. All right. So you're at the roots, I think. Yeah. So to trim the roots away, I was really surprised by this. You want to trim about two thirds of the roots present on your plant when you buy it.

Yeah. It even says in here, this seems extreme, but don't fret. No. And the roots you really want to go after are the bigger ones, the more established ones. You want to leave some at the top at that crown, but especially if you're dealing with a tree and it has a tap root, that root that goes like straight down, that's actually not as much for watering as it is for stability and you don't need it in your tiny little shallow pot.

So you want to get rid of roots like that. Yep. You've got your pot. You want to put a little thin layer of gravel for drainage. Yeah. And that's another big thing. Your pot has to have drainage holes. Oh, yeah.

Good ones. Yeah. Well, you're the lawn watering expert. You don't want a quarter inch of water over it to standing. All right. So you've got your pot. You've got your gravel down there. You've trimmed your roots and you need your soil mixture.

Yeah, this is a big one. It's a big one. And there are different schools of thought on what kind of soil it says in here, equal parts sand, peat, and loam. Yeah. I guess that's like a general generic go-to bonsai soil. But you want soil specific to your tree. Right.

Like if you have a juniper, that's going to probably be different soil than what like an olive tree needs. And so you just need to find out about the plant that you're bonsaiing and find out what kind of soil it likes, how much water it needs, what kind of nutrients it takes, and what kind of sunlight it needs especially. That's right. It's a big one. So you stick that sucker in there.

You've got your trimmed roots and you want to spread them out really evenly toward the edges of the pot of the container. Right. Like just all throughout the container, you want the roots going down. Yeah, and I don't think we mentioned you should run a wire up through the drainage hole to support the tree initially. Yeah, this is a big one. And this wire, it's going to support the tree, but also if you're going to bend the tree,

say you're doing a cascade or a semi-cascade or anything like that. Yeah, or a loopty loop. Exactly. You're going to use that wire to, you're going to train it around the trunk and then bend the wire and it's going to bend the poor plant with it. And you're going to leave it on there for like a month or so at least, but you want to keep a really close eye on it because the tree will start to grow around it and it will be forever scarred and as far as bonsai is concerned, you're just ruined your plant.

So you want to keep a close eye on it. You want to make it tight, but you want to make it tight enough so that when you bend it, it's going to bend the tree with it, but not so tight that it bites into or damages the tree. That's right. Yeah, you want to keep a really close eye on it to make sure the tree doesn't grow and then when it's done after a month, maybe longer, this article says up to a year, but I didn't see that anywhere else.

You want to clip it away. You're not going to unwind it or else you're probably just going to break your bonsai. Right. And hopefully your tree won't go bang, bang, bang and pop back into place. And if it does, you just have to redo it again. Patience my friend. Patience. That's right.

They say in the article, patience is the best tool that you can have in your arsenal. So you get the wire sticking up through the drainage hole now. That's right. And as far as the soil, you want it to be, you want to tap it and shake the pot around to remove the air pockets, firm it around the base of the tree, but you don't want it so packed in that the water's got to go through and drain all the way through and out. Right. Well, you want well draining soil.

One thing I saw was three parts potting soil to one part like miniature gravel, basically. So the soil's going to drain well, apparently you do want it kind of packed because that tree does not have stability with its roots, so it's going to rely on the dirt more than it normally would. Yeah. Especially around the trunk. Right. And then, but yeah, you want to shake it to get the air pockets out for sure.

That's right. A lot of people also put additional gravel on top to keep the dirt in place when it's watered. Ooh, I like that. Yeah. And it looks nice too. Agreed. So you want to do that and then go throw it out in the full sun all day long in July.

What you want to do is start it in a shady spot for about a week and let it get used to being shorter rooted and in a weird new container. Right. And let it accept the fact that it's, I know I'm going to be small. This is going to hurt. I'm going to be small. I'm never going to be a big daddy. Yeah.

And once it gets over that and accepts its fate, and it says, you know what, I actually like this because I'm going to be a beautiful work of art and get lots of care and attention. Now you can move me into the sun a little bit at a time. Couple hours at a time maybe? Yeah. Sir or ma'am. Thank you. Master.

Sensei. Yeah. Sensei. And then yeah, a couple of hours in the morning and then before you know it, you can have that bad boy out there like weathering all kinds of weather, weathering the weather. Normal weather. Yeah. Like it normally would.

Yeah. And your plant's going to tell you whether it's happy or not happy. I think with bonsai in particular, you're going to notice like every little change in your plant. Sure. Because you're really concentrating on it and focusing on it. And all the rest of your plants are going to hate you. Yeah.

By the way. You're going to be like, remember me? Yeah. Your spider plant's going to be like growing around your throat. Yeah. Just closing off your airway. Yep. So watch out for your spider plant.

Agreed. And I should say one more thing. When you first pot your plant, the first watering, you should basically take it in like a tray or a pan or a bucket of water and submerge it to the soil level and just let it sit there. You sure? Yeah. All right. This is what I've seen.

Don't like plunk it in there. Yeah. Slowly submerge it in there and that water is going to make sure that every root gets it to water and it's going to fill in any air pockets that are in there. So it's really going to basically solidify your soil and pack it in and just get it ready. Very nice. Pretty neat, right? Super neat.

Shall we take a break? Yeah. All right. We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about bonsai care and shaping, which is where the money is. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the New I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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So Chuck, you got your bonsai. Yep. You've moved it back onto the sunlight. It's basically accepted its fate as a smaller version of itself. Yeah, you've named it. Right. Right? No?

Yeah. Alan. Okay. Mine's Roy. Nice. So Alan and Roy, the bonsai twins are hanging out outside. When you first pot it, you can also prepare the limbs too, where you're basically trimming the limbs back, one going, so remember there's one in the front, there's a front and a back

to it, right? Yeah, which you should establish and stick to. Right. Typically with bonsai and traditional bonsai, the first limb is about a third of the way up from the dirt, and it's going to jut out to the right. Second one is going to jut out the opposite direction, but it's not going to be even with the other one. It's going to be another about third of the way up.

You rarely want limbs even with one another. It's called a bar. That's unsightly. Exactly. So the next one juts out the opposite direction, and then the third one is about another third of the way up, and that juts out towards the back. So it gives the impression of distance, of perspective. Yeah.

And balance. By having it growing out the back. Yeah. Yeah. Balance and harmony. And you do this by, you can take that same wire, different lighter wire depending on the size of the limb, and bend them in the ways that you want, but more often than not, you're going to be creating these illusions or this pattern by trimming your bonsai.

And like you said, this is where the money is. This is where, when you think of bonsai, this is what I think of little Japanese people like trimming the limbs off of tiny plants. Yeah. And it's, again, you're striving to make it look like something larger that you would find in nature. Sure you could get super weird and avant-garde with your form and your shape, but in general, traditionally, you want it to take a form that you would find out in the wild somewhere.

Yes. Just on a smaller scale. But that's the effect of wind, of sun, of weird weather, of poor soil, of just the weirder looking the tree out in nature, basically the harder the life it's had. And you're trying to recreate that through nurturing, which is kind of counterintuitive. But if you just stop and think about what you're looking at in nature that you're trying to emulate, you'll probably figure out different ways to do it. And if you haven't figured it out, somebody's probably been doing it for a thousand years

already and you can go get yourself a book or look on the internet to find a technique. Yeah. So like you said with the wind, like the real tree and real life that's on the mountaintop, the wind is trying to kill it. And it's leaning out over the edge of the cliff, like, oh man, my days are numbered. But you nurture that in your own bonsai and you emulate that. And it's, I don't know, I like the idea of it for some reason. It's neat.

It's almost. Yeah. It's an homage to that tree that's hanging on by a root. Yeah. When it comes to light, you want to rotate it around. You don't want it getting the same side exposure to sunlight every single day. You want to rotate it around. You want to keep an eye out for bugs and insects.

Yeah, for sure. And again, you're paying attention to your bonsai more than your other plants. So you're going to notice like if it suddenly has an insect infestation. Yeah. A little larva. What are they called? Spittle bugs. They're like a red dots of mites.

It says you can brush these away. I imagine you could smash them with a framing hammer if you wanted after you brush them off. But in the Japanese bonsai tradition, you're probably brushing them away with a little paintbrush. Right. Like you go and go hit the spider plant. Hey, spiders are okay, man.

They eat the little bugs for you. Oh, the spider plant, I mean. Oh, the spider plant. Yeah. Well, you got to watch out for that thing. It's trying to kill you and your whole family. Exactly. So that's where you need to funnel your spittle bugs.

Watering is another big one, too. Depending on how hot it is outside, you may end up needing to water your bonsai like two times a day, which means if you're into bonsai, you probably don't leave your house very much. Most likely want to water your bonsai every day, depending on, again, the plant. But most bonsai needs watering every single day and twice on hot days. Yeah, and what you don't want is, you know, as you're paying attention to it, you don't want a soggy, boggy base where your soil is.

That's a really bad sign. That means you probably didn't put down enough gravel on the bottom, or your soil mix doesn't have enough gravel or whatever mixed in to make it drain quickly. That's right. Because it's tough to overwater a well-draining potted plant of any type, including bonsai. True. You're probably going to be doing more pruning early on in the life of the bonsai, and once it has that general shape that you like, that's when you're doing, you know, just the subtle

changes that probably mean a lot to you, but other friends that come over at, you know, happy hour, they'll just say, hey, nice tree. Nice bonsai. Yeah, you got an ice. And they don't realize that all the little... The ice maker's broken. They don't realize all the subtle little, you know, you might clip away one, you know, a half of an inch of a branch to you that makes it just perfect that other people would

probably not even notice. Yeah. That's why it's your bonsai. That's right, Josh. That's why I was thinking about it, like giving the gift of a bonsai to somebody that you've tended to for years and years and years, that's a significant gift. Yeah. It's like, and here's my daughter.

Yeah. You know? Right. Well, not really. But you know what I mean. You can marry this plant. I love it so much, why don't you marry it? You're also going to keep up with the fertilizer.

Again, like this is almost such a generic overview in some places that I feel bad even saying it, but just go find out what the plant that you're raising needs normally. And do that. Do that. Yeah. But again, you have to bear in mind that it's slightly different because you're keeping it in miniature. It doesn't have its normal root system.

It needs more water than usual. And it's probably because you're watering it so much, the nutrients in the soil are going to leach out much more quickly. So you need to fertilize it more than you would just if you were growing it normally in a container, right? So since you're fertilizing something more, usually the rule of thumb is you want to fertilize something weekly, weekly. So W-E-A-K-L-Y, weekly, and that way you're constantly replenishing the nutrients in the

soil, but you're not going to burn or scorch the roots with a chemical burn by overfeeding it. Yeah. And again, you pointed out earlier, but I think it bears in mind repeating, the key is repotting and trimming those roots every couple of years. And like you said, once you find the pot at the flea market that you fell in love with, you can keep it in that pot forever as long as it's the one you want to stay with. I mean, you can do what you want.

But... Or give it as a gift. Or give it as a gift. And as you keep trimming these roots back, it's going to stay that size. If you forget about it, if you're a hoarder and you're drunk and you pass out for 10 years, you're going to wake up with a 12-foot oak tree in your living room. That's the story of Pappy Van Winkle. Is that...

Yeah, I guess that is true, isn't it? Because, yeah, you're basically once it becomes established to the shape you want it, you're just basically pruning it back here, there, keeping it trimmed, and then when you repotted every couple of years, like the whole point is to keep the root system in check, huh? Yeah. So if you didn't do that, yeah, it would just start to grow. Well, it would die is what it would do, because it would... Yeah, nobody would water it.

There'd be so many roots in a pot that doesn't fit them. It'd probably look cool, it'd be growing over it. Maybe. And that's some... That's basic stuff that we've been talking about, but there is a lot of advanced things you can do too, and one of those is like, again, training it to grow over rocks. So when you potted the bonsai, you would want a bonsai with really long roots so that you could...

When you're potting it, you would actually place it on a rock and then wire the roots in place to let them start to establish in the pot, just things like that. There's something called gin, which is basically... This is really neat, I'll bet you saw it. Did you see a lot of bonsai that had dead wood exposed? Yeah, yeah. The gin is where at the top of the trunk or at the ends of limbs, dead wood is exposed to just really play up how old this thing is supposed to be, or actually is.

There's something called shari, which is dead wood on the trunk below. Cool. And then there's something called sabamiki, and that's like... You actually get in there and peel away the bark, drill into the trunk and carve holes into it, carve a gap into it to create the illusion that it was scarred from like a lightning strike. Wow. You've got to be really careful doing that because you can very easily kill your bonsai,

but if you do it right, it'll grow back and scar around it, and you'll have a pretty interesting looking tree. So that's not recommended for beginners? I would not think so. Yeah. I think you'd kill a lot of plants doing that that way. And again, people have been trying this stuff for a couple thousand years now, so there's a lot of different stuff you can do and a lot of different resources out there.

Nice. Yeah. Go to your local Japan town and say, teach me. Yeah. And you know what? If the movie... Karate Kid. Lost in translation is true, then if you're a pretty American girl, you can wander into

any Japanese ceremony, and they will just accept you with open arms. Yeah. That's what they're known for. Yeah. Yeah. Probably so, right? Sure. Aren't you not a jerk?

Well, yeah. Like, what did she walk into? Was her's a origami or was that Bonsai? I don't remember. I don't remember. Was it a wedding? No. Scarlett Johansson walked in.

Was it outdoors? There were these Japanese women doing some... It was either Bonsai or origami or something, and they were like, oh, well, you know, come on in. And let me show you our ancient ways. Yeah. I don't remember that part. Yeah.

Yeah. That was neat. That is neat. Great movie. I'd like that movie a lot, too. Yeah, around it, that Bill Murray's actually playing himself. Like it's based on an experience Sophia Coppola had. Yeah, I bet it's not too far off.

And so Giovanni Robisi is Spike Jones, Scarlett Johansson is Sophia Coppola, Anna Ferris is Cameron Diaz. Yeah, I heard that. That one dude is Justin Timberlake. Uh-huh. And so this actually supposedly happened, but then everyone says, well, who's Bill Murray playing? Allegedly, Bill Murray is playing himself.

That makes sense. I mean, like... We'll never know what he whispers at the end either, which I love. Yeah, that's a great movie. I forgot about that one. Make it Santori Time. She's a part of my 100% club, Sophia Coppola. Oh, what is that?

The directors who I made nothing but great movies. I think I've only seen that and The Verge in Suicides. Great movie. What else has she made? She did The Bling Ring recently. Never saw it. Really good. Really?

Don't be turned off by the title. Yeah, because I have been. Um, and she did the one with Steven Dorff. Oh, I can't remember where he's the actor to sort of hold up in the Chateau Marmont. Before daylight. With his daughter. No. Before sunrise.

Nope. Before tomorrow. Nope. And she did the one, the, uh, Let the Meatcake, uh, Marie Antoinette movie with Kirsten Duntz. It was fantastic. I never saw that one either. Yeah. They're all great.

I think she's top notch. I'll check them out. Uh, if you want to know more about Banzai or Sophia Coppola, you can type those words in the search bar at HouseToForks.com and since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Yes. I'm going to call this, uh, Tornado Miss. Already?

That thing just came out today. I know, man. And you know what? Uh, I hope everyone's all right because they're tornadoes, like, kind of all over the place today. Yeah, I heard Oklahoma's got. Kansas? Yeah.

Uh, hey guys, love the show. I'm going to call this, uh, Tornado Miss episode that I bet you would get an email from a civil engineer and here I am. Just wanted to share an interesting fact about designing wind resistant buildings. I remember the day of the 2008 downtown Atlanta tornado you mentioned because it was actually the last day of classes at Georgia Tech before I went on, uh, before I went home to Florida for spring break. Ironically, I just learned in one of my classes that one reason most skyscrapers are not the

same basic shape from top to bottom is to alleviate pressure from wind. In the same class, a professor had mentioned that one of the absolute worst structural designs for a skyscraper is a perfect cylinder, which is what our peach tree plaza is that had the windows out for so long. Yeah. It's a cylinder. Uh, the wind whips all around and ends up hitting the entire face of the building as a giant wall of force rather than hitting the building at different places over time.

Not ideal for a glass tube of a building. Uh, anyway, I thought you guys would find that interesting. You are the best thing to come out of Athens in my Georgia Tech opinion. Oh, wow. I see where that was going. Keep up the good work and that is from Scooter Sheldon. Thanks a lot, Scooter. Scooter Sheldon.

I don't know about the best thing to come out of Athens. There's a couple of bands and beers and coffees and football players. We're going with Scooter's Take. All right. Thank you, Scooter. If you want to give us high praise like Scooter did, we're always down with that. You can tweet to us at S.Y.S.K. podcast. You can post cool stuff on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

You can find us on Instagram at S.Y.S.K. podcast for real. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Several podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.