Common Name - Cotoneaster

Latin Name - Cotoneaster Horizontalis

Flowering Period - May

Care

Whenever a beginner to bonsai asks me "What is the best plant to start with?" I always recommend the Cotoneaster. It is readily available - most gardens contain at least one specimen; if there is one, there are usually some seedlings on the ground below it. Even if one has to buy a plant they are comparatively cheap from the garden centres. It is extremely tolerant of misuse, forgiving all but the most drastic neglect. In addition to all this, it gives flowers in late spring, high gloss dark green leaves through the summer, autumn colour, and berries in winter.

They are slow to thicken to the size shown here, but old garden plants are not hard to find. The specimen in the picture was collected in June 1993 from a garden where it had outgrown its position. By the time I was called, the owner of the garden had already removed most of the roots, leaving just those that went under the neighbour's fence. These also had to be sacrificed, so I was left with a trunk of some one and a half metres, with no branches and no roots. I decided that the height was too much, so I reduced it to about 25 cm., and planted it in a training pot. To my surprise, it not only grew - it flourished, although the right side of the trunk from the ground up to about 5 cm. is actually dead.

It has since then been in a number of different bonsai pots, the first being very shallow, while the current one is slightly deeper in order to encourage growth. Having a trunk, I am now trying to hang some acceptable branches on it. If allowed to grow freely, shoots will thicken to half a centimetre quite fast. They can then be cut back in autumn after leaf drop, or in spring just as the buds open. I favour spring, because the wounds will callous over more quickly. I find large scars slow to callous over, partly because the bark and cambium layer are quite thin, and partly because slugs and snails constantly attack the cut paste that I put over the wound. The trunk on this is so short that they do not have far to climb!

I feed this plant quite heavily with a fertilizer based on chicken manure, which encourages vegetative growth. This means that although I get a few flowers, most of the energy is spent on leaves and shoots, which will appear all over trunk, even coming as suckers from below the soil. Any that are not required should be removed as early as possible in order not to scar the trunk too much.

The plant still needs considerably more foliage, and grows vigorously each year. I tend to just let it grow, and correct the imbalance when I prune hard in the spring. Once I have the required ramification, I will apply less fertilizer during the early summer and allow the plant to become more pot-bound in order to encourage flowers. The vigour of this material is such that even root pruning can be carried out quite aggressively without too much fear of losing the plant.

Although this is an easy plant to grow, and one that I am quite happy to keep and work with, it does not have the appeal of the plants which flower on bare wood such as the apricots or corylus family. Nor are the berries quite in the league of those on the deciduous holly, with the bright coral colour standing out so well on the bare twigs in winter. Maybe when it gets a little more mature it will move up the scale of favoured plants in my collection, but in the meantime it is relegated to the growing-on bench. The sun only reaches this spot for a couple of hours each afternoon, but the plant still gets turned 180° every week, along with the rest of my collection.