Bonsai Trivia
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59 free Bonsai trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This bonsai trivia quiz starts with the basics — what the word means, how bonsai differs from dwarfing, why the Japanese tradition has no indoor bonsai — and works through the named styles (formal upright, cascade, broom, windswept, raft, forest), deadwood techniques like jin and shari, akadama soil, glazed versus unglazed pots and the rules of a formal display. Then it goes to the history and the famous trees: the 1195 scroll that first shows dwarfed pines in Japan, the Noh play about a samurai who burned his trees for a monk, the 500-year-old Sandai Shogun pine in the Imperial Palace, the Yamaki Pine that survived Hiroshima, John Naka's Goshin, Omiya Bonsai Village and the Kokufu-ten exhibition. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups; the rest will test even growers who know their moyogi from their shakan. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's bonsai, penjing and museum pages and the sources they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the Japanese word 'bonsai' literally mean?
Pot planting
Pot planting is the literal sense: bon is a tray or pot and sai is a planting. Nothing in the word means small or tree, so the name describes the container rather than the plant.
Q 02Japanese bonsai grew out of which older Chinese practice?
Penjing
Penjing reached Japan as souvenirs: more than a thousand years ago, envoys and Buddhist students returning from China carried container plantings home, and Japanese growers later pared the art down to a single tree.
Q 03What is Korea's equivalent art of miniature potted trees called?
Bunjae
Bunjae is Korea's art of miniature potted trees; the word is the Korean reading of the same two characters, 盆栽, that Japanese reads as bonsai.
Q 04A tree collected from the wild for training as bonsai is known by what Japanese term?
Yamadori
Yamadori are often the most prized and costly bonsai, because poor soil and hardship in the wild have already spent decades stunting and ageing the tree before a grower ever digs it up.
Q 05What Japanese term names the spread of surface roots at the base of a bonsai?
Nebari
Nebari is the visible flare of surface roots where the trunk meets the soil; a wide, even nebari is prized because it makes a small tree look old and stable.
Q 06In which 1980s film series does a teenager spend his college fund on a bonsai shop for his mentor?
The Karate Kid
The Karate Kid's Daniel LaRusso puts up the money in Part III (1989) and Mr. Miyagi makes him a partner; when thieves strip the shop, Daniel risks a cliff climb for a rare tree Miyagi had brought from Okinawa.
Q 07Around the 14th century, dwarf potted trees in Japan were called 'hachi no ki', which means what?
The bowl's tree
Hachi no ki means 'the bowl's tree': hachi is a bowl or fairly deep pot and ki is tree. The term named Japan's dwarf potted trees for centuries before 'bonsai' replaced it.
Q 08In the Noh play Hachi no Ki, a poor samurai burns his last three potted trees to warm which guest?
A travelling monk
A travelling monk, snowbound at his door, gets the fire. He proves to be the regent Hōjō Tokiyori in disguise, who later restores the samurai's lost land and adds three estates named for the plum, cherry and pine.
Q 09Japan's Sandai Shogun no Matsu, a bonsai pine once tended by a 17th-century shogun, is thought to be at least how old?
500 years
500 years is the cautious estimate: the pine was already old when a shogun took charge of it in the 1600s, and generations of palace gardeners have kept the same tree alive ever since.
Q 10The ancient bonsai Sandai Shogun, 'the third shogun', is named for which ruler who tended it?
Tokugawa Iemitsu
Tokugawa Iemitsu, third of his line, was so absorbed in his potted trees that, in one story, a councillor flung a favourite into the garden to shame him back to work; he kept growing them anyway.
Q 11Which emperor moved his court to Tokyo in 1868, where bonsai went on display inside and outside his palace?
Meiji
Meiji started a lasting custom: bonsai have had a part in palace affairs ever since, with prized trees carried in to welcome state guests.
Q 12Which shaping material entered Japanese bonsai practice around 1910, replacing string, rope and burlap?
Wire
Wire let growers bend a branch exactly where they wanted and sell the tree at once; the hobby boomed, though so did the number of trees scarred by wire left on too long.
Q 13Which bonsai tool did toolsmith Masakuni I devise so that a removed branch heals without a bump?
The concave cutter
Q 21The 'broom' bonsai style, hokidachi, with a straight trunk and ball crown, is typically used for which trees?
Elms
Elms suit hokidachi because they branch so finely: the trunk stops about a third of the way up and fans into twigs, a ball crown that looks its best bare in winter, like an upturned broom.
Q 22Fukinagashi, which in everyday Japanese means a fluttering streamer, names which bonsai style?
Windswept
Windswept trees have every branch, and often the trunk, streaming to one side, as if a gale never stopped blowing; the style is meant to show a tree that has survived everything nature threw at it.
Q 23The raft style, ikadabuki, mimics what natural event?
A tree toppled on its side sprouting new trunks
The concave cutter bites a shallow hollow where a branch is removed, so the wound closes flush. Masakuni I, a maker of flower-arranging scissors, brought it out in the 1920s soon after the first shears made for bonsai.
Q 14What is Japan's most prestigious bonsai exhibition, first held in Tokyo in 1934 and now staged every February?
Kokufu-ten
Kokufu-ten trees are entered under their owners' names, though professionals usually prepare them; before the war the show ran twice a year, in spring and autumn.
Q 15A 'tanuki' bonsai, a live sapling fixed to old deadwood, is named after which trickster of Japanese folklore?
The raccoon dog
The raccoon dog, or tanuki, is the shape-shifting trickster of Japanese folk tales, and the word also means a sly person: a fitting name for a young tree dressed up as an ancient one.
Q 16Under what title was Yoshimura and Halford's 1957 bonsai 'bible for westerners' later reissued?
The Art of Bonsai
The Art of Bonsai is the later title of The Japanese Art of Miniature Trees and Landscapes, which Yuji Yoshimura wrote in English with his student Giovanna Halford after opening bonsai classes to foreigners in Tokyo in 1952.
Q 17Which Japanese volcanic clay, sold in graded granules, is the staple of bonsai soil mixes worldwide?
Akadama
Akadama holds water yet drains freely, but its granules crumble after a couple of years and choke off the air, one reason bonsai need repotting so regularly.
Q 18What sets the formal upright style, chokkan, apart from the informal upright?
A perfectly straight trunk
A perfectly straight trunk, tapering evenly from base to tip, defines chokkan; it copies a tree grown in open light with no rivals to dodge, whereas the informal upright bends as it climbs.
Q 19In the full cascade style, kengai, where does the apex of the tree end up?
Below the base of the pot
In a full cascade (kengai) the apex drops below the base of the pot, mimicking a tree growing over water or down a mountainside; a semi-cascade (han-kengai) stops at or just beneath the rim.
Q 20What is the Japanese name of the informal upright style, with visible curves in the trunk?
Moyogi
Moyogi, the informal upright, has a trunk that curves gently as it rises yet ends with its tip above the base; it is among the commonest styles because so many trees grow that way in nature.
A tree toppled on its side sprouting new trunks is what the raft copies: growers lay a trunk flat in the soil so the branches on top grow on as a row of trunks sharing one set of roots.
Q 24The trees in a yose ue forest planting traditionally total what kind of number?
An odd number
An odd number is the convention, at least until there are too many trees to count; they are also set in a staggered pattern, never a straight row, so the group reads as a natural stand.
Q 25What separates the two rock-planting styles, sekijoju and ishitsuki?
Roots wrap the stone vs roots grow inside it
Roots wrap the stone vs roots grow inside it: in sekijoju they clasp the rock and reach soil in the pot below, while an ishitsuki tree lives in soil packed into the rock's own cracks, so the rock is its pot.
Q 26In deadwood technique, what does 'jin' refer to?
Bark stripped from a whole branch
Bark stripped from a whole branch leaves a jin, the bleached stub of a limb that wind, lightning or age seems to have killed; the same effect on the trunk is called shari.
Q 27Bonsai's 'no trace of the artist' rule puts a pruning scar where?
At the back of the tree
At the back of the tree, out of the viewer's sight, is the usual place; failing that, the cut is disguised as storm damage, its stub carved like a limb torn off by wind or lightning.
Q 28Bonsai aesthetics discourage which quality in branch and root placement?
Symmetry
Symmetry is deliberately broken: designers alternate branches left, right and back, never setting two at the same height or letting two reach the same distance from the trunk.
Q 29Which Japanese aesthetic concept, beauty in imperfection and transience, informs bonsai design?
Wabi-sabi
Wabi-sabi is why bonsai prize rough bark, deadwood and hollow trunks, all marks of passing time, and why many are shown bare in winter rather than in full leaf.
Q 30A traditional indoor bonsai display has the tree, a hanging scroll, and what third element?
A companion plant
The shitakusa companion plant stands for the foreground, the scroll for the background, and all three are chosen to evoke a season.