Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bonsai: Year One

Bonsai: Year One

Sima, A.

Paperback

Series: Bonsai, Book 1

Japanese GardensLawns, Trees, & Shrubs

ISBN13: 9798996418602
Publisher: Sima Press
Published: Jun 8 2026
Pages: 448
Weight: 0.97
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Most first trees don't die from neglect. They die from care.

You brought home a small tree in a shallow pot, and within a week you began to worry about it. This is the book for that worry: a 446-page first-year reference that takes a garden-center juniper as seriously as other books take show trees.

A reference, not a pamphlet

Most beginner bonsai guides run around 100 pages, because there is only so much room in a watering chart and a row of icons. This book runs about three times that length, and the difference is not padding. It is cause. Why the repotting window opens at bud-swell and not on a date. Why the same juniper lives outdoors in Portland and dies on a windowsill in Phoenix. Why the pruning cut you are tempted to make in August should wait for March. When you know why, you stop needing the chart.

What's Inside

  • 27 chapters in five parts, from reading a trunk line in the nursery row to a tree alive at the end of its first year, kept by someone who finally knows why.
  • Nearly 60 full-page ink plates: anatomy, styles, techniques, and failure signs, drawn for this book and referenced from the text, not decoration.
  • The keeping, explained by cause: light, watering, soil, fertilizing, repotting, pruning, wiring, and the first winter, the season that kills most first trees.
  • The beginner species honestly ranked: juniper, Japanese maple, Chinese elm, ficus, and the rest, including which survive indoors and which only die there slowly.
  • Month-by-month calendars for five North American climates, so the schedule matches your weather, not a garden halfway around the world.
  • The chapter most beginner books are too polite to write: what not to do in your first year. And the Japanese vocabulary taught where it appears, never turned into a quiz.

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