Indoor and Outdoor Bonsai Species
While there are more than 100 tree species that can be shaped and trimmed into bonsai, several are considered the most suitable for beginning enthusiasts to cultivate.
Your first consideration should be whether you plan on growing your bonsai indoors or outdoors, as each species needs a specific climate to flourish. When selecting a bonsai species, you should decide whether you want a colorful, flowering tree, an evergreen, or a tree with lush foliage in the spring, summer, and fall but that goes dormant in the winter. Deciduous trees lose their leaves in the fall and don’t bloom during the winter. These include maples, ginkgos, and elms. Conifers are trees that produce cones and include evergreen species such as cedars, firs, junipers, pines, cypresses, redwoods, spruces and yews.
You should also have a rough idea of the size you’d like your bonsai to be when full grown.
Basic Starter Bonsai
One of the best trees to start with is a Japanese maple. It can be grown from another starter tree or from seed. The Japanese maple is compact with small leaves that turn vibrant shades of red and orange in both spring and autumn; it’s a very pretty tree. Chinese elms also make good starter bonsai. Although you can keep the Chinese elm indoors, it is basically an outdoor tree. Most deciduous trees thrive best outdoors.
Indoor Species
Tropical species are meant to be cultivated indoors, grow slowly, and often don’t need excessive trimming and pruning. These include Hawaiian umbrella trees, natal plums, baby jades, Chinese azaleas, and various ficus varieties. Hawaiian azaleas are available in a dwarf version that makes them perfect for bonsai, and they are easy to grow and maintain. Natal plums, which are semi-tropical evergreens, require simple indoor care and bear sweet-smelling white flowers and dark-red fruit after pollination. You can actually eat these plums. A Chinese azalea, or Chinzan, often blooms several times during the year with stunning pink flowers.
Another popular flowering indoor species is the flowering peace lily. Native to South America, this plant has many branches and deep green leaves. Its delicate white flowers bloom often throughout the year as long as it gets enough light.
Outdoor species
In addition to most varieties of maple, other outdoor species suitable for bonsai are larch, flowering crabapple, elms, and pines including blue spruce, cypress, cedars, and boxwoods.
Junipers are very popular bonsai as they are hardy, easy to shape and prune, and tolerate changes in weather, making them an excellent choice for beginners. Japanese black pines are also easy to train into bonsai as are Japanese white pine that can grow up to 50 feet tall in the wild but are simple to shape into an elegant asymmetrical bonsai.
In addition to Japanese red maples, American maples can also be grown into outdoor bonsai, as well as the Himalayan cedar, bald cypress, Okinawa holly, flowering crabapple, and the boxwood tree. Flowering crabapples produce fragrant white flowers that cover the whole tree in the early spring, and then foliage begins to appear. The miniature apples, or crabapples, develop in the fall. Flowering crabapples are simple to grow and maintain.
The Okinawa holly is a miniature version of the holly tree that blooms with little pink flowers during the spring and summer months. It is a good choice for beginners as it is both hardy and unique looking, yet requires minimal care. Boxwoods, a category of evergreen shrub, have close to 70 species, all of which make good bonsai. Most boxwood trees will produce distinctive yellow flowers in the spring.
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