Why Bonsai Takes Time — And Why That's Beautiful
We rush very little here. A trunk thickens by a millimetre a season. A branch you wire this spring will only begin to look inevitable three years from now, and the tree will keep its own opinion about it the whole time.
People often ask how long it takes to “make” a bonsai. The honest answer is that you don't. You keep a tree alive, you make small decisions, and you come back next year to see what it thought of them. Somewhere in that exchange the tree becomes something you couldn't have drawn.
That is the whole pleasure, as far as we're concerned: not the finished silhouette, but the long, quiet middle where nothing much appears to be happening at all.
PatienceEssayThe long game
