Alasdair

A lot of the time suppliers to both bonsai nurserys and to plain nurserys will be one and the same. A company somewhere who grows thousands of trees and then sell them to retailers who sell them on to the public. If you bought a juniper from a nursery and put it in the ground, you will produce a bush. Put a more expensive juniper from a bonsai nursey in the same patch of ground and you get a bush.

Then again, the later bush will probably be a better shape. But in buying the later, you may be able to get three from a plain old nursery for the same price. I think it is a case of quality vs quantity, but mistakes are made. You can still get the quality in landscaping trees, and if you find three of these, you have three times the quantity which are all the same quality as the expensive shrub from a specialist.

You've just gota go looking.

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I can feel another "I wish that was my tree" moment coming on...
Currently studying BSc Plant Biology at the Universty of Wales, Aberystwyth