Bonsai Containers

Tips and Techniques to Choose The Best

Wondering about choosing the right bonsai containers for your bonsai plants? Well search no more! Here you will find all that you must keep in mind shopping for the perfect container for your bonsai plant.

Bonsai is an intricate art form and choosing the right container to house your bonsai plant will contribute a lot towards improving the overall aesthetics of the bonsai. The most important indicators to be considered while shopping for a bonsai pot are listed below.

Shape and Size of the Container

It is of utmost importance to have a bonsai pot that aides in increasing the overall beauty of your bonsai plant instead of overriding it.

Imagine a photo inside a frame. The container can be considered as analogous to the frame for the bonsai plant. And hence the shape and size of the pot should be proportioned to the shape and size of the bonsai tree it houses.

Containers or bonsai pots come in various shapes and sizes. They could either be square, rectangular, oval, cylindrical or oval in shape.

You may either buy your bonsai pot first and then go hunt for a tree to compliment it or do it the other way round by finding the tree first and then searching for perfect container for it.

Material Used for Bonsai Containers

Containers are usually characterized by the material used to build them. The glaze and color on pots add to the embellishment of the bonsai plant. Some of the most exotic pots are known to be made of a special type of clay popularly known as china clay.

Glazed ceramic pots are popular among many bonsai enthusiasts. Pots for bonsai plants are also made of concrete and at times from rocks that get there shape by natural disintegration.

Drainage Facility in the Pot

Any bonsai pot must have proper drainage holes to ensure that excess water drips out of the pot. A pot without any holes will result in the soil holding excess of water which would lead to root rot.

Pick Your Color

Choose a color for the container that compliments the tree you are planning to grow in it. Bonsai pots come in various different colours and glazes, the most common being yellow and brown. Pink and grey glaze are very popular colors as well.

Check the Depth

The pots should be of the right depth to hold the plant growing in it. One of the techniques commonly used to select the depth of the container is to get one that has a height of one third the depth of the total height of the bonsai plant, only including the trunk, leaves and branches.

The length of the bonsai pot should also be approximately equal to 70 % of the total height of the bonsai tree. One of the other techniques that artists use to decide on the right shape of the container is that they take a photograph of the fully grown bonsai tree they want to grow, draw pictures of different bonsai containers and place them beneath the photograph of the bonsai plant. This gives them a fair idea as to what should be the most appropriate shape of the bonsai container.

Know Your Bonsai Style

The kind of container to be used would also depend on the kind of style to be followed for the bonsai plant. If you are growing a bonsai tree in the literati style then you would chose a different shape of bonsai container than when growing a tree in the windswept or cascading style.

Well chosen bonsai containers will go a long way in ensuring proper growth of your bonsai tree. Its just not about the looks but the functionality as well, which is why choosing good pots is so very critical for your plant’s future.

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