Walter_Pall

Fred, I don't fully understand how I robbed you of some illusions. But I do understand how you gained more insight.
Since you folks seem to enjoy it, on teh expense of maybe confusing some even more here some addition about this natural style:

Naturalistic: This is the style where trees are formed so that they look as close as possible like real trees. This means that many classical rules have to be broken. Often these trees are looked at as „weeds" or raw material by the audience who is not yet used to them. It seems to be easy to design a naturalistic tree – just let it grow. This is by no means true. A good bonsai in the naturalistic style needs just as much consideration as an abstract one. Otherwise it really is just a weed.
In many discussions on the internet it became obvious that most people find it difficult to accept the term "naturalistic". The general feeling is that it is superfluous because every serious bonsai enthusiast tries to create natural looking bonsai anyway. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most bonsai enthusiasts try to create bonsai which are as ideal as possible, making them quite the opposite of naturalistic; they are rather abstract, idealized trees. Another misunderstanding is that people think a naturalistic bonsai is one that is left as is, without any further design. This is, of course, absolutely not the case. Lynn Boyd proposed to call it "romantic" style. This should be a title which is better understood by most people.
Any bonsai or piece of art needs some degree of abstraction. The naturalistic bonsai has a lesser degree than the abstract one, but it still has the helping hand of the artist. Only the artist wants this to look like it was never touched by human hand. If done well, it it may look to the audience like this should not be so difficult, they could do the same thing. This is similar to people standing in front of a modern abstract painting and saying that this could be done by their child. Well, if this is the case, why is the child not world-famous?
It is interesting to note here that many contemporary artists are either going towards very abstract or very natural trees, to the extreme in any case. It is often overseen that many classical trees of Japan are naturalistic and also most penjings. In the West this seems to be revolutionary. It is only as a reaction to neo-classical design with slavish adhearance to rules which never were meant to be used like a law.
We have to be reminded that style in the context of this classification means the overall spirit of a bonsai, contrary to the form, the shape of a specific tree. One can well take a classical form and design it with naturalistic details, thus creating a naturalistic bonsai, because of the overall feeling. For many tree species and certainly for many individual trees the classical forms just don't fit; at least this is the feeling of some artists. Thus they have started to create new forms with trees that before were not used commonly as bonsai. Vaughn Banting has dared to replicate the natural look of Swamp Cypresses, which have a flat top with several crowns in nature. The author has pioneered the candelabra form on conifers. Very often trees along the timberline are struck by lightening and the main trunk dies. Lower branches develop into one or several new trunks which then look like a candelabra. Another form that has emerged to accurately describe and represent trees that grow in nature is the Banyan "style" for Ficus. Banyan trees grow in tropical climates and typically include air roots that emerge from the trunk and descend from branches to the soil. In nature these roots function to stabilize the tree and to help the tree establish it's "territory". Another example is the Baobab "style" which resembles the rather strange natural growth of Baobab trees in Africa. In South Africa Baobab trees are styled just like they appear in nature, with their enormous branches which look like fat roots sticking into the air.
Charles Ceronio mentions some more African forms besides the Baobab-form which he calls "styles": The Pierneef Form: The acacia is a tree every one knows in Africa. It grows in a typical almost geometrical semi-circle-crown, like open umbrellas. Another form is the Flat Top Form, which again is the typical form of an acacia species which is common in the warmer parts of Africa and there actually is called "flat top acacia". The top is very flat indeed and someone outside Africa might call it grotesque. But it all is just a matter of what one is used to see. Ceronio also defines the Bushveld or Natural Form, which is basically the same as the informal broom form, or Oak Form, which is the most common form of deciduous trees anyway. The Wild Fig Form is mainly identical to the American Banyan "style".
The overwhelming majority of deciduous trees and many conifers grow in the informal broom form in nature which usually has a single trunk with some taper that very soon spreads into several trunks which grow upwards and again spread into upwards growing branches. The trunk and the branches of this form are bent. When they are straight, one speaks of the well documented formal broom form. It is most interesting to note that traditional bonsai rules simply have no term for this form which is by far the most frequent in nature. Every bonsai enthusiast must have wondered at one time why he is not supposed to style his trees just like the ones he sees in his front yard. Contemporary bonsai artists now style in exactly that way. Paul A. Ringo has described this form which he calls "live oak style" and wonders why it is not used more often for western species. One can go further and also wonder why it is not used more often for Asian species.
The informal broom form could make a similar career as the informal upright or mojogi form. It is very hard to believe that as late as 1955 in Japan it seemed to be necessary to encourage the public to use this "new" form. When the natural resources of collected material had shrunk considerably it became normal to create bonsai from nursery grown trees. These were invariable in "ideal" shapes – at the time the formal upright form too often was the only ideal. So the advice in "An Easy Guide To Bonsai" was: "..training the individual tree freely in accordance with its own characteristics, so as to bring out its special flavor to the full". This was aimed at the fashion of trying to style every tree into the formal upright form and thus creating clichés and repetitions which all looked alike and often where not fit for the species used. It seemed to be necessary to make it clear to people that trunks did not have to be straight, they could be bent; branches did not have to be straight and always in the ideal position, they could have bends and kinks.
It is hard to believe today that the informal upright form needed special encouragement not so long ago. It is by far the most common and popular form today. The informal broom form could go the same way. It is nothing more than a variation of the informal upright form, where most branches appear on one level and branches in general have a strong tendency to grow upwards – a form found in most deciduous trees out in nature.
Naturalistic and natural are not the same. A naturalistic tree can be created with very artificial design methods. It is quite possible to have a tree with totally artificial deadwood which was created so well that it absolutely looks natural. It is also common to wire a tree up to 100 % and carefully bring all the branches in position so that the tree looks very natural. This is one of the paradoxes of bonsai.