Root over Rock is one of Eric's favorite bonsai styles, and at any time he has at least a half-dozen young trees in training with auxiliary soil retention mechanisms in place to ensure that the roots make it into the main container so they can eventually be exposed to enhance the value of the composition. Even when selecting stones and arranging roots with intention, there are improvements to make two or three years after the rock and stones were initially paired.

Eric's desire to design his own bonsai stands for his show trees lead him to a woodworking epiphany - some woodworking projects can only be created with hand tools. Learn what it takes to make a beautiful and elegant bonsai stand with hand tools and hand work. 

Eric uses a little pine as a case study to address his internal debate between "bonsai by subtraction" and growing trees into bonsai via seeds and cuttings. There is a school of thought in bonsai that if you eliminate something from a tree you will end up with a result that is a better, more interesting bonsai. On the flip side, this can produce a tree that is simpler, but not necessarily more interesting. Decisions to cut large branches from bonsai should only be made after careful consideration of all options.  

While many amazing examples of juniper bonsai are created from trees collected from the wild, smaller trees of exceptional quality can be created by careful crafting of juniper cuttings over as little as 5-10 years. Read this article to learn how!

To create a well-designed bonsai requires finding a balance between two competing factors – human perception and the natural form of a mature tree. While a tree in nature exists indifferent to human approval or interest, a bonsai is a caricature of the natural tree, created in partnership with a human. A bonsai is shaped by our perceptions, and represents our vision of the natural tree - not the natural tree itself. We've created the concept of visual flow in bonsai because it supports our perception of what an ideal tree should look like. 

Eric steps through the process of making a slant style Japanese Black Pine bonsai tree that is roughly 20″ tall, starting from seeds and growing and styling the tree from scratch. It’s a process that involves lots of watering, fertilizing, and waiting for months until key time periods when critical work must be done.

Elms can have a good fall clean-up and look nice over the winter, but after a round of healthy spring growth they can start to look overgrown and have dieback in the finer branching. Here's a quick review of how cutting back an Elm bonsai and thinning it a bit can cause back budding and new interior branching.

Hey, sometimes bad things happens to good bonsai. We made this video to give you an idea of how you can help your tree recover. Broken containers, smashed branches, oh my!

Eric has an “ah-ha!” moment while contemplating the trunk of a small, cutting-grown Kishu Juniper bonsai. He walks through how to compress the existing bends further to make the tree more compact and create a design where the branching and the lower trunk work together. Before, during, and after photos included.

If you follow me on Instagram (@ericschraderbonsai) then you’ve seen my feed of photos – most of them contain a light grey backdrop with a gradient on it and a single tree lit from the left side. I’ve had quite a few people ask how I create these images so here are the basics and a bit of background. I think it was 2008 when my long-time teacher, Boon Manakativipart asked if I would take all the exhibit photos for the annual Bay Island Bonsai show. I was a new-ish member and flattered that I had the opportunity. At the time, I...

Follow this 5-10 year plan for dramatically improving the quality of deciduous bonsai trees with judicious augmentation of trunk height and/or girth. Eric Schrader demonstrates how to start development of the refined branch structure while simultaneously increasing the size and character of the trunk by using sacrifice branches and large containers, and/or ground growing.

Detailed, step-by-step guidance on making exposed-root pine bonsai, following a tree Eric grew from seed in 2006 over 9-years of development.