What to do in the first year after a tree is collected or badly root-pruned, using the waiting periods in the essays and two outside accounts. No survival percentage is stated, because none of these sources published one that this page should repeat as a fact.
The homepage says the tree needs a 12-month period to settle and prove itself, and that plants should not be sold as proven until, in general, 12 months after collection. His beginner notes say not to rush a tree into a bonsai pot, never to wire and repot at the same time, and to wait until a solid root ball shows the tree is established. His yew was left eighteen months before he cut or carved, and he took good extensions in the first year as his sign of a working root system. The quarry larch on the intermediate page had been established two and a half years from collection before the cascade styling he describes. The raft larch stayed eighteen months in the tray, then another twelve months after the bare-root and rock work, before styling. Those are his trees. They are not a schedule for a species he did not write about.
A society talk, in outline
The South Devon Bonsai Society’s yamadori page, reporting advice given to the society, says survival starts with as large a root ball as you can manage, and with keeping soil on that ball so the roots stay moist and the tree is not shocked into a completely new medium on day one. They describe bagging the ball so soil is not shaken off on the way home. If there is space, they say plant it in the garden with some new compost in the hole and leave it a good year so roots can replace what was cut to lift the tree. If it cannot go in the ground, give it as large a container as possible, and the speaker advised a very gritty compost in a container. After at least a year, and only if the tree appears to be thriving, consider training and a training pot. Do not go straight to a bonsai pot. Reduce the root ball gradually. The page says the tree is still only potential bonsai until the branches are reduced and there is decent ramification.
One old juniper is not a rate
The Lake Merritt account of a California juniper collected in the 1990s says that tree’s first move was into a large growing box for three to five years, to recover and to grow feeder roots near the surface, and that a bonsai pot waited until the tree was healthy, with bushy foliage and branch runners. That is the history of one very old juniper in a public collection. It is not a survival rate, and it is not a reason to ignore a shorter or longer wait that a different tree is showing.
Across these accounts the shared caution is the same as in those essays: keep the plant alive and rooted before you ask it to be a styled bonsai. Watering, in his myth replies, is constant attention in a small container, moist but not standing in water. He said he would write a feeding program later. That program is not in the saved essays, so this page does not invent one.