Why a tree takes eleven years
Nothing here is potted up and sold the same season. A trident maple goes into a growing bed in the ground for eight or nine years first, because the flare at the base — the nebari — only thickens while the roots are running free in soil, and the moment a tree goes into a bonsai pot that thickening all but stops. So we lift it, cut the taproot back, plant it again, and lift it again two summers later. That is where the eleven years goes, and it is why the prices on this page read the way they do. A collected tree is older still: the wild olive standing at the front of the shade-house came off a farm outside Graaff-Reinet in 1994 and sat in a wooden box for six years before anyone went near it with a cutter. You are not buying a plant. You are buying somebody's patience, and the pot is the last two percent of it.
