Reviews for Bonsai School: The Complete Course in Care, Training & Maintenance

The average rating for Bonsai School: The Complete Course in Care, Training & Maintenance based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-10 00:00:00 John Eagle "Bonsai is not a race, nor is it a destination. It is a never-ending journey." Well, I have patience, lots of it, but 10 to 15 years of care and maintenance to start to see the outcome of shaping a decent little bonsai, I admit, that's really frustrating.. And people think that fishing needs patience. However, i think the experience in itself is pleasant, and got to keep in my mind that Bonsai is "the art of distilling the magic of an old tree into a miniature form that is pleasing to the eye".. And art is an endless process. After reading some books, taking notes, watching so many tutorials and long hours of video and online lessons for beginners, and applying the basics of rooting-repotting-defoliating- air layering- pruning- watering- grafting- fertilizing- wiring ect. on my purchased cheap Ginseng Ficus (RIP poor tree, it has suffered a lot) I ordered a set of Bonsai tools from China and think I'm finally ready to try these techniques on my tiny Japanese Acer Palmatum (Red maple tree).. I didn't start with seeds, I got the shrub at a nursery , but meanwhile I have also planted some cuttings of a Bougainvillea, if I did it right it will expectedly be rooting around 2-3 months (we have a warm autumn here).. Hopefully, some day, I will grow a Bonsai tree, like one of these beauties

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-29 00:00:00 Kenneth Deill I found this book to be frustrating and irritating. The writing was disorganized, jumpy, and imprecise. The information presented was incomplete, leaving me wondering how to do the most basic of techniques they would mention, but not not explain. Over and over, they would give step by step accounts of how this or that "master" changed this poor, cast-away tree into a new "classic." But in these accounts, they didn't actually teach anything. They described only. If that wasn't enough, the book's editing and layout was unacceptably terrible. Pictures were miscaptioned. Pictures were mixed-up. Words were misspelled. Layout was horribly unaesthetic and confusing. It was difficult to tell where one person's writing left off and where another started. It was also difficult to tell where the text was compared to random captions for random pictures that may or may not have been related to each other. Aweful. The one bright thing about this book was the short explanation of the history of Bonsai. However, even that was marred by bad writing and bad editing. In fact, there were to sections for the history of Bonsai, and they said similar things. It should have been condensed, but it wasn't. And in all their descriptions, they did not include a picture of the things they were describing. It was horribly disorganized. Steer clear of this one.