Exhibited
The Ledger Maple
Acer buergerianum
Started 1954, and every year of it written down
Broom · 78 cm · c. 140 yrs
£24,000
Ditchling, East Sussex · Keeping trees since 1979
Two centuries of tree, in a pot you can lift
Everything here is one object with a history — collected from a hillside, imported, or grown from seed and worked on by hand every year since. Nothing is propagated to order, and nothing is replaced when it sells.
On the bench
What we would keep
Four or five trees we would be sorry to see go, which is the only honest basis for a featured list.
- Rarely offered
Six O’Clock
Chaenomeles japonica
Fourteen centimetres, and it flowers like a shrub
Informal upright · 14 cm · c. 35 yrs
£2,400
- Yamadori
Stonecrop
Juniperus communis
Off a Cairngorm slope in 1991, under licence
Literati · 91 cm · c. 320 yrs
Price on request
Seventeen
Zelkova serrata
Seventeen trunks on one slate, planted 1998
Forest planting · 74 cm · c. 44 yrs
£11,800
How it is arranged
Collections
Heritage Specimens2 available
Trees old enough to have outlived the people who started them, each with the full record of whose hands it has passed through.
Shohin & Mame2 available
Under twenty centimetres and no less finished for it. The hardest discipline in the craft, and the easiest to live with.
Yamadori2 available
Collected off the hill rather than grown in a field. Deadwood, movement, and trunks no nursery could produce in a working lifetime.
Forest & Landscape1 available
Plantings rather than single trees: groups on slab, root over rock, and the long views they imply.
Forty-six years of watering somebody else’s patience
The nursery began in 1979 with eleven trees bought out of a dispersal sale in Kent, most of them in a worse state than the auctioneer had implied. Four of those eleven are still here. Two are not for sale and never will be.
Almost nothing in the polytunnels was started by us. A specimen bonsai outlives the person who begins it, which means this trade is mostly custody: you take on somebody else’s forty years, you do not undo their decisions for the sake of your own taste, and you hand it on in better condition than you found it.
What we actually sell is time — somebody else’s, compressed into a trunk that no amount of money can shorten. Everything else in the price is the pot.
Our own winter viewing, 2026
Winter Silhouettes
Once a year we open the polytunnels in the worst week of January, when there is not a leaf on anything deciduous and there is nowhere for a bad branch to hide. It is the only honest way to look at a broom.
In person
Where to see them
A photograph flattens a tree, and flattening is the one thing a bonsai cannot survive. These are the places a specimen can actually be walked round.
Our nursery
Beacon Lane Nursery
Ditchling
Everything in this catalogue is here unless it says otherwise. Four polytunnels, a growing field, and a kettle.
Gallery
The Alcove
London
Two or three trees at a time, rotated monthly, shown one to a room the way they are meant to be. Usually shohin.
Gallery
Kyoto Court
Edinburgh
Our two larch groups live here through the summer. Colder than Sussex, which they much prefer.