Bonsai enthusiast instinctively recognises that a Bonsai pot can greatly enhance the presentation of your Bonsai’s beauty. While choosing your Bonsai pot is ultimately a very personal and cultivated skill, there are a few basic guide lines that most bonsai enthusiast recognise and use to in order to help them get their Bonsai and its pot to present a holistic picture. The Bonsai and Pot together not only make a very pleasant picture but also are chosen to help you tell a story, perhaps one about its age and beauty and tranquillity  or perhaps one of its struggle and survival with nature’s stormy elements. The bonsai and its pot must be chosen so one complements the other, with the primary focus of the composition the Bonsai and the story it is telling.

The Guidelines

Bonsai Pots come in a multitude of shapes, sizes and colours, some as small as a thimble and some as large a couple of meters in length. Pot shapes are nearly as large, with round ones, rectangular ones, hexagonal ones, square ones, tall ones and squat ones. So how does one choose which one suits our Bonsai Tree. Here are some guide lines to help you choose. Start with the pots glaze, usually the first and easiest place to start.

Pot Colour

Traditionally, bonsai pots are made out of ceramics or stoneware of some kind of some kind or the other, and because they usually have to be durable and weather proof, they can be fired at very high temperatures. As a general rule the higher the firing temperature of a pot the more frost resistant a pot is going to be. When pots are fried they can be glazed or they unglazed.

Unglazed Pots

Unglazed pots take on an earthen colour, the colour varying from a light brown to dark brown, from a rusty brown to a red brown. Even within the colours the shade of the pots varies from firing to firing.
Earthen coloured and unglazed pot are best suited to Conifer and other dense foliage compositions. The dense greens or blue greens of conifer foliage tend to go well with the browns of unglazed pots.  Choose a shade of pot that highlights and complements the colour of bark of the Bonsai.

Glazed Pots

Glazed pots are invariable coloured with very colourful glazes. Ensure that the glaze on the inside of the pot does not go beyond a third of the depth of the pot. The unglazed surface help the root get a grip on the inside of the pot.

When choosing a colour for the glaze of you port select a colour that pickup on and complements one colours of a key elements or features of your Bonsai; it could be its flowers, its bark , its foliage perhaps even its fruits.

Table of Contents

Bonsai Introduced:

What is Bonsai? Introducing: Bonsai Styles, Bonsai Sizes.

Looking after your Bonsai

Basics of Bonsai Care - Watering and feeding, Bonsai Pruning, Training and Shaping and Bonsai Repotting and Root Pruning. Creating your First Bonsai, What Bonsai Tools?, Choosing a Bonsai Pot?, What Bonsai Wire?.

The Experienced:

Advanced Bonsai Styles why are they important? Some Advanced Bonsai Technique including Field Growing, Yamadori Introduced. Bonsai Species Guide – an exploration into Species Suitable for Bonsai.

Beyond Bonsai:

In this section I shall try and explore areas where Bonsai touches in other spheres of life, in healing, in meditation in self discovery and anything my readers would like to explore.