News
June 01, 2017 | Donna Balzer
Growing trees and shrubs in pots around your condo or townhome deck saves space, money and time
For Mike in Lethbridge, it started as a rescue operation.
He found dead-looking shrubs in the garbage behind stores and homes. He revived them, not as full-sized trees, but as miniature, windswept versions of their bigger selves.
His rescues became bonsai, and he built a delicate forest of trees in tiny pots.
Before I met Mike, I had never seen a crabapple or potentilla in a bonsai pot.
Why bother with bonsai? While a crabapple tree at 10 metres tall is a big tree, a 60-centimetre version in a bonsai pot is the perfect size for a patio. And the brilliant red crabapples, 1.5 centimetres across on a full-sized tree, are still the same size on a bonsai version of the same tree.