page_title: Bonsai styles
section_title: Concept of styles
hierarchical_section_title: Bonsai styles / Concept of styles
caption_attribution_description: English: A bonsai forest planting of Black Hills Spruce (Picea glauca var. densata), with small dwarf boxwoods representing shrubs, on display at the 2008 exhibition of the Bonsai Society of Greater Hartford.
context_page_description: Bonsai is a Japanese art form using miniature trees grown in containers. Similar practices exist in other cultures, including the Chinese tradition of penjing from which the art originated, and the miniature living landscapes of Vietnamese hòn non bộ, but this article describes the Japanese tradition.
  The Japanese art of bonsai dates back over a thousand years, and has evolved its own unique aesthetics and terminology. A key design practice in bonsai is a set of commonly understood, named styles that describe canonical tree and setting designs. These well-known styles provide a convenient shorthand means for communicating about existing bonsai and for designing new ones.
context_section_description: Styles can be grouped based on different criteria, such as the trunk orientation or the number of trunks in the bonsai specimen. Some of the major style groupings include:
  Trunk orientation. A frequently used set of styles describe the orientation of the bonsai tree's main trunk. Different terms are used for a tree with its apex directly over the center of the trunk's entry into the soil (these are the upright styles, including chokkan and moyogi), slightly to the side of that center (e.g., sho-shakan), deeply inclined to one side (e.g., chu-shakan and dai-shakan), and inclined below the point at which the trunk of the bonsai enters the soil (the cascade or kengai styles).
  Trunk and bark surface. A number of styles describe the trunk shape and bark finish. For example, a bonsai with a twisted trunk is nebikan (also nejikan (ねじ幹)), and one with a vertical split or hollows is sabakan. The deadwood bonsai styles identify trees with prominent dead branches or trunk scarring.
  Trunk and root placement. Although most bonsai trees are planted directly into the soil, there are styles describing trees planted on rock. For example, the root-over rock style is deshojo (出猩々), and the style in which trees are rooted wholly within (atop or on the sides of) a large rock is ishizuki.
  Multiple trunks. While the majority of bonsai specimens feature a single tree, there are well-established style categories for specimens with multiple trunks. Within these styles, a bonsai can be classified by number of trunks alone (e.g., sokan for a double trunk from a single root, soju for two separate trees, sambon-yose for three trees, and so on). The configuration of the trunks can also be described by specific styles, including raft (ikadabuji or ikadabuki) and sinuous (netsunagari) styles for multiple trees growing from a connected root, and the general term yose-ue for multiple unconnected trees in large number.
  These terms are not mutually exclusive, and a single bonsai specimen can exhibit more than one style characteristic. When a bonsai specimen falls into multiple style categories, the common practice is to describe it by the dominant or most striking characteristic. For example, an informal upright tree with prominent areas of missing bark and trunk scarring will be described as a sharimiki rather than a moyogi.
caption: Forest style Black Hills Spruce
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