A short companion to the homepage essay. It does not add a new definition over that essay, and it does not treat yamadori as a species.
On this site, the homepage essay says yamadori roughly translates from Japanese as the collection of plants from the mountains. He describes trees collected from the wild and naturally stunted by climate, poor soil, altitude and ultraviolet light, a short northern growing season, wind and abrasive sand, and grazing. He says that combination is rare, that consent and a survivable root ball come before the walk downhill, and that he expects about twelve months before a collected plant is proven. That essay is the homepage.
Other writers use the word a little differently, and the difference is worth seeing so the pages are not mashed together.
- The South Devon Bonsai Society says that in Japanese, yamadori means “mountain tree,” and that in their country the term has taken on a slightly different meaning: a tree collected from the wild. The same page says a newer phrase, “urban yamadori,” is being used for a tree dug from a garden. Their example is an oak from a cousin’s garden, not a mountain.
- A 2023 account from the Golden State Bonsai Federation’s Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt, about a California juniper collected in the 1990s, glosses the word as collected from the wild.
So the shared idea is a tree taken from where it was already growing, not a cultivar bred to be tiny. The homepage stresses mountain conditions that stunt a mature tree. The Devon page allows the word, in local use, for wild collection more broadly, and even flags a garden dig as a newer, separate phrase. This site does not pick a winner. When these pages say yamadori, they mean the sense used on the homepage, unless a sentence is clearly quoting someone else.
Nothing here is a how-to for digging. Permission is a separate page, ethics and permission, because the word’s meaning and the right to take a plant are not the same question.