Bonsai!

Meet Dave! Dave is our resident bonsai expert, and he does some incredible things with plants. Closer to Father’s Day, we’re going to have a bonsai seminar this year where Dave will do demonstrations on plants from the nursery and create bonsais with them on that Saturday and Sunday.

We wanted to highlight that picture of that weeping cherry he worked on. He was able to take a weeping cherry, which normally grows eight feet tall, eight feet wide, and miniaturized it. It’s only about two foot tall, and he’s creating this layering effect. It’s a bonsai plant made out of a weeping cherry, basically. I had no idea that that was something you could even do. One of my favorite things is when he takes stuff that is out of the discount section that looks really, really bad, and he makes it look really cool. One of the plants he did a few years ago was a wisteria, which is a vine, but it can be trained up and grown like a tree. He took that plant, and when that thing was blooming, it had these gorgeous six-inch grape-like clusters of blooms hanging down off of it on this little, tiny plant. It was absolutely beautiful. Some of the things he’s able to create are pretty incredible.

We actually make our own bonsai soil here at Rohr’s Nursery. We looked at several different manufacturers, and there was none that Dave really liked. And I said, well, what do we need to do to make the right soil? He named it and we got it. We blend our own soil here at the nursery and package it up. It’s the best possible soil you can’t find anywhere else. It has to do with drainage. You want it to hold some moisture, and you want to have a good pine bark ingredient in there because the pine bark will help reduce things that cause root rot. And because we’re having to water the bonsai so regularly, we also want to make sure the soil is well drained. We want it to hold moisture, but we want it to drain really well. And we just couldn’t find a soil that met his standards, so we made our own.

We’ll be announcing that bonsai seminar once we have the dates finalized, but it will be closer to Father’s Day. We try to wait a little bit on that and watch the weather, and we want to make sure we’re doing it on a weekend because he’ll have a tent set up outside for the bonsai demonstrations. Normally we have anywhere between 15 and 30 people attend and learn how to take care of the bonsai they already have or make new ones. Keep an eye out for that announcement!

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).