Small Wire Bonsaï

A bonsaï is a tiny tree, so a tiny bonsaï is a tiny double-whammy.

My Mother used to have a small wire Baobab tree sculpture. Having bought too much metal wiring and having a free afternoon I decided to see if I could recreate something similar.

I wanted to make mine a bit more personal. A more tortuous trunk with twisting and turning branches and roots as if they were floating in the air.

The result did not entirely live up to my expectation, but still looks quite nice.

The materials used are charmingly simple :

• Some generic metal wire spool from my local dollar store
• An blue glass marble as a base

As for the tools :

• A needle nose pliers for details
• Two regular pliers for twisting the wires together
• Wire cutter

After quick 1:1 sized sketch, I estimated the necessary lenght of wire. I'd need long strands so that I could bend them tortuously, and only 10 or so separate branches.

For reference, I cut a dozen strands at around 35cm (13.7in) and ended up with a 10cm (3.9in) tall tree.

How many and how much wire YOU will need will obliviously vary from tree to tree. Rather than trying to follow my instruction to a T, I actually encourage you to experiment with as many shape as you'd like. Try to see what you can do !

I then gathered the cut wires and tied them together at a quarter of their length. The longer side would form the tree itself, the rest would become the roots.

Gripping the wire with the pliers and twisting them with the second, I keeped turning them into place until they felt nice and secured.

With a fitting length of "twisted trunk", I shaped the metal into a more pleasing shape similar to my preliminary sketch.

I'd like to share that I found it easier to "overbend" the tree a little and then bend it back into place. It seemed to hold its shape better afterward.

Once the base trunk was fully formed I started to separate the wire into separate groups of branches and twisting them separately.

I settled onto 3, 4, 3 and 2. And further split them into 1+2, 1+3, 1+2, 1+1 and even further into 1+1+1,1+2+1 etc...

Once again, this will vary from person to person. Furthermore, not all branches needs to separated at the same time. For instance, you could isolate a 3 from the rest and keep the rest of trunk together to form a low branch.

I then reshaped the branches into proper shape using needle nose pliers.

When sculpting them I found useful to keep in mind that "trees are 3 dimensionals" and that "branches can really spread out a lot" if that makes any sense to you.

And finally I twisted the remaining individual wire into a "leaves" shape. I opted to keep the "leaves" horizontally flat, tortuous and deliberately long.

How you decide to shape those leaves will play a major role on how your finished product will look.

I've seen some coiling them like snails or even omiting them entirely.

I left some bits straight and pointed them directly downward, similar to the way aerial roots or vines hang off branches.

Now that the tree itself is done, It is time to form the roots. Simply repeat the same steps but upside down.

Spread the roots into groups, twisted them together, split them again, and then reshape to your liking.

You'll note that the tree stands fine on its own and is actually quite elegant this way. If you don't want to add a base then you can just leave the tree as is.

If you do want to add a base, then it's a good idea to group the roots tightly together. The wire tends to bend back to its previous shape.

If said shape was a tight claw, the roots will tend to "grip" the base; if it was a flat plane, they will loosen themselves.

Simply bend the roots back to fit around your base.

In my case the marble was small enough to simply "pop-in".

In the case of a larger base, such as a large flat piece of drift wood, you would need to anticipate and use longer roots to wrap around and properly secure the tree in place.

Or just use some glue, that works too.

Now, before you go ahead and try for yourself, there are some nitpicks I have with my own creation :

• Using a marble sounded cool and emphasised the scale of the baonsaï, but turned out to be a poor idea : the marble rolled around and the sculpture couldn't stand upright on its own, I had to jerry rig and ugly stand with some hot glue. Drift wood would have worked better and even would have been more poetic.
• The leaves don't look amazing, It might have been a better choice to use longer branches and less leaves.
• I think the banches are too thin and should not have split this early, the tree can look a bit skeletal at certain angles.
• It sounds silly, but I poked myself with the wire a lot. To avoid that just bend back the very tips of the strands of wire into a "U" shape.
• ...

Despite this I'm still quite happy with the result. I hope to find the motivation to make more of them in the future.