In New Zealand there are only a couple of options I’ve found so far for indoor Bonsai. These are better known as houseplants, the Ficus and the Jade plant. The one I have is the Crassula Ovata Jade which has the larger fleshy leaves. Their natural growth is profuse and messy with new growths sprouting from the trunk. Although they lend themselves well to Bonsai they need pruning to shape at least a couple of times a year to stop them getting “leggy” and too bushy. The idea is to shape them to resemble a bonsai shape with branches with pads of leaves and visible free space that you can imagine a bird flying through.
This is the photo of the top my jade before pruning. you can see that there is a lot of leaf and you can’t see the branches much at all. No bird is going to fly through this lot!
I’m going to go through the Jade and trim each stem down. When you prune a Jade you cut at the point where there are two leaves, new nodules will form and new little leaves will grow from that point.
This is a photograph of another Jade I pruned a while ago. You can see 2 new sets of leaves starting to form where I pruned it.
While pruning I also remove any old damaged or wrinkly leaves.
I then take off any downward facing branches and new branches forming up the stem where I don’t want them.
You can see these leaves have little white spots on them. From my research I understand that these are caused by our water here which contains a lot of lime and other minerals. Basically the leaves “sweat” the salty minerals out during transpiration and the white spots are the residue. They clean off easily with a damp tissue or cotton bud but as they actually cause no harm I usually just leave them.
This the Jade after pruning. It’s a lot tidier but it still needs opening out a bit more to give more space. In order to do this I need to take out bigger branches so I’m going to leave it for a few days before deciding which ones I will remove. Although Jades are more forgiving than trees and will grow new branches happily this takes time and they may not be where I want them.
Two days later I came back. This is the area that I didn’t like. It is too full and lacks definition.
This branch is quite big and full and is blocking the view to the back pad of leaves so I cut it out.
Once I did that I could see that this little branch is facing forward and inwards so that comes off too.
This branch on the left looks a bit bare at the moment but when the new leaves grow in from the pruning it has just had it should look ok
These are the branches I cut off. They will make nice cuttings after the ends have dried
Now I’m happy! This will now go back to its home on the windowsill to do its thing. It looks quite different to the Jade I started with.