Making a bonsai forest on a stone slab

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If you are still stuck at home due to lock downs and isolation you might consider starting a bonsai. A single tree can be labour and time intensive. That is if you can even get stock to create a bonsai or buy a pre “made” bonsai.
An alternative to creating a single display tree is a group planting. Among the most common style of group plantings is a forest. The advantage of a forest is that you can use inferior stock but still get a good bonsai. That is a simple but effective solution for any one who is stuck at home or has limited options.
In this video we show you how this could be done. While you may not want to plant your forest on stone you could want to make a regular forest. You could want to create saikei or landscape. The same ideas generally apply but we have dedicated videos on these topics/ styles.
We recognize that accessing bonsai pots may be hard at the moment . Many are made in china a shipped out tot he world/. If the bonsai pot is not available or you can not afford to spend money recklessly and what alternatives could you use?
This is why we made our forest on a slab of stone. You could dig up a rock, salvage broken tiles and more instead of a premade cut and cleaned stone paver. This starts you on the path of forgoing a standard bonsai pot.
When making a a display like this you need to aware of how your soil and base will effect water retention and flow. Will it retain water or will it flow freely. Will this lead to a dry soil or something like a swamp. If this is true than you should consider modifying your base. Simple holes will aid drainage.
Not using a pot present unique challenges. The first is creating a wall or edge to your planting so the soil does not wash away. This will keep your tree(s) in place. For this we used muck.
The muck recipe we use is as follows but yours may vary.
It begins with equal parts manure and clay (this is why we where gloves). We than add sphagnum moss and peat moss equal to ¼ of the new volume. This adds a little bit of texture to our muck that is useful for retaining moisture, providing drainage and letting roots take hold to eventually replace the muck wall.
This is complimented in our planting by an azalea specific soil mix.. Your planting may or may not need this. If not you can use a standard bonsai mix.
This approach to creating a forest planting does have certain strengths and weaknesses.
Obviously the lack of a need for a standard pot and ability to turn just about anything into a display is a strong point of this approach. You can take sub par stock that would either take years to turn into a solitary display or may not ever achieve this status can instead be collectively transformed into a true exhibition worthy display. This does not apply to our bonsai just yet but may in several years.
The problem is finding ways to make your planting work. Having appropriate resources and materials. You need to be comfortable with using many trees in this way. Than there are the major differences from traditional bonsai.
A forest planting is good for those who have access to or can easily purchase a stock of trees that are not suited to a traditional single bonsai tree display. Where a tree might not be of acceptable quality by itself it might pass as a quality bonsai display in conjunction with other sub pat trees. This is the old adage of not seeing the trees because of the forest.