Bountiful Bonsai: Create Instant Indoor Container Gardens with Edible Fruits, Herbs and Flowers

Description

Bonsai-the Japanese art of training plants to form elegant sculptures-is an age-old craft that appeals to gardeners and non gardeners alike. Traditional bonsai requires expensive plants and years of tedious work. This book presents a radical new approach that applies bonsai techniques to everyday houseplants, instantly turning them into beautiful bonsai sculptures! Bonsai expert Richard Bender not only expects his plants to look good but to yield pleasant fragrances, fresh herbs and fruits

Richard W. Bender was born in St. Louis, MO and grew up with an Ozark rural lifestyle. The combination of a rural life connected to nature and the cultural advantages of attending a large high school provided a unique perspective that is reflected in his writings for several newspapers and magazines including Horticulture, Field & Stream and The Herbal Companion. After graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a B.S. in fisheries and wildlife management and two years in neuroscience grad school, he moved to Colorado in 1985, where he has operated Bonsai By Bender for 20 years, supplying unique bonsai to clients like the Missouri Botanic Gardens, Franklin Park Conservatory (Columbus, OH,) Portland (OR) Classical Chinese Garden and the COMO Park Conservatory in St. Paul, MN. His first book, Herbal Bonsai was in print for 15 years.

"In his new book, Bountiful Bonsai: Create Instant Indoor Container Gardens with Edible Fruits, Herbs and Flowers, Bender sets out to teach us how to shape and enjoy bonsai houseplants...Bender's aim is to teach us how to quickly grow ordinary varieties with modern techniques and everyday garden tools. We may have to do some regular or even heavy pruning on some of these plants; bonsai edibles kept in a sunroom, for example, may grow faster and much taller than their tiny, wired counterparts confined to small containers. But the payoff in fruits and fragrance--plus the pleasure of living with a bit of nature in your home--is surely worth the effort." --HGTV Gardens blog "The Look: it's a pretty book, well laid out with all of the photos in color with well written captions. The feel is smooth and cool, kinda like the flip side of the pillow. One could easily cuddle up with it and drift off to sleep. The Text: the author, Richard W. Bender, has an easily readable style, very conversational and informal. He doesn't use much in the way of jargon or overly technical terminology to make himself appear more learned. The Information: he knows his stuff." --AdamAskWhy.com (Adam's Art and Bonsai Blog) "This book provides a decent foundation for selecting a plant and paying attention to its needs to make it succeed, and Bender shows you how to select a plant and prune it in a way that can, in an afternoon, give you the impression it's been trained for some time already." --BoZannical Gardens blog