The essays already require the farmer’s or landowner’s consent. This page adds only what public sources say, and it stops where the rule changes from place to place.
On the homepage he writes that finding a tree is only the first problem, and that obtaining the farmer’s or landowner’s consent comes before removing it with enough root to survive. That is his standard. This page does not water it down.
What one society tells its members
The South Devon Bonsai Society tells readers they must not dig up trees from anywhere unless they have the landowner’s permission. The society describes digging without that permission as theft and says it carries a criminal charge. That is the society’s statement about the situation its members are in. It is not a statute quoted for every country, and this site does not invent the name of an offence where the society did not name one. The same page says the society has not run collecting trips for a few years, partly because tree diseases, including what they spell as phytophthora, are spreading, and they do not want to carry disease home or help it into a new area. It also says to be selective, not to take everything in sight, and that a tree often grows better in the ground it is already in than in a pot of unfamiliar soil.
Public land is not one rule
The U.S. Forest Service wildflower ethics page says illegal removal of native plants from national forests and grasslands is a real problem, including plants that are endangered. It lists consequences: fewer plants left to reproduce, less food and cover for pollinators and other animals, less for other visitors to see, and the plain fact that most wildflowers dug from their habitat do not survive transplanting. The page says there are legal ways to collect native plants from national forests and grasslands. The copy fetched for this article does not itself set a fee, a map, or a list of species. Those details are not filled in from memory.
One forest does publish a transplant permit that names bonsai. The Inyo National Forest forest-products page, which showed a last-updated line of 28 September 2026 when it was read, says the forest has long offered transplants for home landscaping or the traditional practice of yamadori for bonsai, and it tells people to contact a listed visitor centre to buy the permit. On that page the published terms include 7.50 dollars per plant, a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 40 in a given year, valid for one year from purchase, hand tools only, size limits (seedlings and saplings below waist height and no more than 1 inch at the root collar; five-needle conifers prohibited), place limits (wilderness, research natural areas, the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, and other closed sites), a rule against taking more than half the plants in a given area or plants isolated by 30 feet or more, and backfilling the hole. Those terms are that forest’s permit page. They are not a national price, not a permit you can print from Yamadori.com, and not a rule for a different forest, a park, other public land, or another country. Other units set their own products and their own limits. Ask the office for the land you are standing on. If the answer is no, the answer is no.
Private land still starts with the landowner, which is the point the homepage essay already made. A neighbour’s hillside, a quarry, and a road verge are not yours because a tree looks like bonsai material.