Bountiful Bonsai

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Richard W. Bender. Bountiful Bonsai

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When I was young, my mother told me, “Boy, the way you like to eat, you better learn how to cook.” I grew up with a large vegetable garden and operated a produce stand to earn money until I went to college. My family also collected wild mushrooms, fruits, and game animals in the woods. Following Mom’s advice, I learned to look for food everywhere, and learned to cook what I found. I even expect my houseplants to provide a useful crop. I dedicate this book to my mother, Marie K. Bender.

Bonsai: An Overview

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These fruits are considered ornamental. While their quality doesn’t compare to that of full-sized commercial pomegranates, they are beautiful and technically edible.

A few edible species are becoming more common in indoor tropical bonsai collections, particularly Australian cherry (Eugenia paniculata), dwarf pomegranate (Punica granatum var. nana), Barbados cherry (Malpighia emarginata), and Natal plum (Carissa macrocarpa). All of these are easy to find and have several varieties available, some of which are known to produce more fruit than others. Natal plums are used extensively in landscaping in the desert Southwest and should be easy to find at nurseries in that area. Dwarf pomegranates, which can flower and fruit heavily, are becoming very popular as bonsai specimens. Large fruiting pomegranate varieties have larger leaves that may go deciduous for a period; they aren’t as attractive as the dwarf variety, but they do bear much larger fruit. The heavier flowering and fruiting varieties of Australian cherry are widely sold at local nurseries as large topiary specimens, but the miniature varieties that make the most spectacular bonsai only flower sporadically, and in twenty years of growing them, I have never seen them bear fruit.

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