It's inevitable. When you get started in bonsai you are so excited at the prospect of growing these wonderful little trees that you bring almost anything home with the idea of turning it into a miniature miracle someday.
You start with one tree, but quickly you have two, three, ten, and before you know it, there is nowhere left to put your newest acquisition.

But take a moment and look at where you are in your bonsai "career". Are you still a beginner? If so then you may be perfectly comfortable where you are, and that's okay.

But if you feel you are not a beginner anymore, if you have developed an eye for good material, if you can honestly critique a tree and find not just what's good about it, but also see what's lacking, then maybe it's time to start thinning your collection of trees.

I know it's tough. It is for me. Heck, I have a hard time tossing cut branches for fear of losing a good cutting, but it's really not going to help me develop good bonsai. Not in a reasonable timeframe.

My friend Paul Pikel wrote about this on his site and I think he really nailed it when he asked himself, "Where will this tree be in five years?" Five years! It's not a lifetime, but it's a long enough. If at the end of five years you still don't have a very nice tree, chances are you never will. At least not to where it would have been really worth the time and effort.

The fact is that when you factor in your time, the space occupied, the upkeep, the containers, fertilizer and, yes, even the water used, was it really cheaper to grow that cutting out than it would have been to just buy a well developed specimen from the start?

Add to this the fact that with a cutting you are not really doing much. It's not really bonsai. It's just gardening at best, but waiting and ignoring mostly. With a developed tree you could have been bending, shaping, pruning, refining, and SHOWING your tree. Your BONSAI. It seems like a no-brainer. However, there are exceptions.

There are cutting in my collection that I will probably keep for a long as I can, knowing that five years will not be enough to create a developed tree. There are a few reasons I will do this.

• One, if the material in question is hard to come by and I would like to have more of it I will grow out a cutting.
  
• Two, if I know I will be performing grafts on a tree to repair or add some feature, I will grow out cutting for that purpose.
  
• Three, if the material has some sentimental value, I will grow it out.
  

Now reason one and three are not issues that I run into very often, if at all. But reason two is something that has already paid dividends for me.

In my "Root Grafting a Ficus" article, you can read how I took two ficus cuttings and added them to the parent tree to build out the root structure. It's a fairly simple way to fix imperfect features on an otherwise good tree.
Right now I have a med sized crape myrtle growing in a pot. The roots are interesting. The trunk is not bad either, but the leaves are pretty large and it would look so much better with small leaves.

I have several dwarf crape myrtle cuttings growing out to eventually be thread grafted onto the normal crape. It's a lot of work and it will take a significant amount of time, but the results can be amazing. Take a look at Paul Pikel's grafted crape myrtle to see what I mean.

Thinning out your collection has other benefits as well. For one, it frees up your time to focus your attention on your best trees. I'm to the point where it's getting hard to keep my trees well tended. This will help.
Also, is it just me, or does having a bunch of nursery pots in your yard make it very hard to keep it clean? Every bonsai buddy I have that is still in the cuttings stage has trouble keeping a clean yard. There is just too much stuff in the way.

There is also something else to consider when choosing which trees to keep. I bet there are trees in your collection that you thought where great a year or two ago when you started, but now you wouldn't show that same tree to your bonsai friends. They are trees that have no redeeming quality for bonsai, yet there they are taking up your space and time.

Maybe it's time to make a choice. Stay at the level you are or start moving your collection in the direction of the masters. The kind of collection your bonsai club will want to take field trip just to see. That's what I'm shooting for. I hope you do too.