About Slowbranch

Slowbranch is a cultivation diary for bonsai. It keeps records rather than articles: one tree, one season, what was done, and what the tree did in return. The site is written and maintained by a small group of growers who work outdoors in a temperate climate and keep far more trees than the published record shows.

What is on the site

The diary uses three kinds of entry, and they are deliberately different in shape.

A tree record is the file on one specimen. It carries the cultivation data — species, style form it is being trained towards, pot type, wire gauge and the season the wire went on, the pruning window, how many years until the next repot, the water profile, the wintering zone, and how many years the tree has been in training. Underneath that data is the prose: what happened this year, and what changed in the plan.

A technique paper is the file on one operation — structural wiring, repotting and root pruning, candle pruning on pines, partial defoliation, shari carving, thread grafting, air layering. Each paper lists the tools it actually needs, the number of steps, and a risk level. The risk level is not decoration. It is the site's own judgement of how much a tree can lose if the work is done in the wrong week.

The seasonal calendar is the dated spine that holds the other two together. Each note names the solar term it hangs on and the season it falls in, and states what has to be finished before that window shuts.

Twelve style forms are defined once, in the glossary, and every record that uses one links back to the definition.

What the site is not

Slowbranch is not a shop, not a forum, and not a plant clinic. Nothing here is written for a specific reader's tree, soil, water or climate. A juniper that tolerates a hard prune in one garden can lose its only live vein in another. Treat every entry as a record of what worked once, in one place, and check it against your own conditions before you cut.

How the archive grows

Entries are published on a schedule, not all at once. New records appear as the seasons that produced them come round again, which is why the seasonal calendar is the front page rather than a list of everything ever written. Some entries are dated forward and appear on the day they belong to.

Corrections

Bonsai practice changes as growers learn. When a record turns out to be wrong — a repotting window that was too late, a wire that should have come off a month earlier, a soil ratio that held too much water — it is edited and the change is dated rather than quietly deleted.

Getting in touch

Write to [email protected]. See the contact page for what is useful to include.