5 Nuisance Plants That Can Be Used As Bonsai Objects

If you live in the city or the suburbs of a city you will often see nuisance plants (even when they are still small plants) that are cut down and thrown away, even though in the right hands these plants can be made into attractive and beautiful bonsai.
 

What is a nuisance plant?

Nuisance plants are plants whose growth is undesirable, or that have strong and fast growth. They also include plants that can harm their surroundings such as damaging the surrounding environment because they invite pests or have effective toxins on the plants or animals around them. That is what is meant by a nuisance plant if they grow in settlements.

Then what plants are considered annoying and can be used as bonsai objects? Here are 5 of them:
 

1. Banyan (Ficus sp.)

As we know, the banyan is considered the most popular tree. How not, this tree can grow and live anywhere, including on walls, roofs, or between concrete roads or bridges. The banyan tree is one of the hunts for the city cleaning team because if it grows in a place that is not supposed to be, it can cause damage when it grows up.

Now if you want to make bonsai for free, you can take advantage of wild banyan trees that grow in places where the area owner doesn’t want them. I take for example on the wall or the roof of the factory as well as on the sidelines of the concrete road or bridge.

What is included in the Banyan/Ficus family?

There are quite a several trees from the banyan family and most of them are aggressive nuisance trees. For example: Weeping Fig (F. benjamina), Chinese Banyan (F. microcarpa), Wonderboom (F. salicifolia), Amatillo (F. pertusa), White Fig (F. virens), Rusty Fig (F. rubiginosa), Moreton Bay Fig (F. macrophylla), and many others.

The banyan tree that grows wild usually has good characteristics to be trained into bonsai because it has aerial roots and the tree is adaptable and resistant to disturbance.
 

2. Mousetail Plant (Phyllanthus reticulatus)

This type of plant is still a little confusing for those of you who have just jumped into the world of bonsai, that’s because there are several species of this plant that have similar characteristics such as Katuk (Sauropus androgynus) and Mousetail Plant (Phyllanthus myrtifolius).

Mousetail plant or more familiarly called “ileng-ileng” or “mangsian” in the world of bonsai is a wild plant that grows a lot on roadsides, gutters, and in empty gardens. This plant is considered a weed because it does not provide benefits and grows very fast.

You can make the Mousetail plant your second choice of bonsai object besides the banyan. This tree has small leaves and black fruit that appear all year round. It is suitable for bonsai trees and ornamental trees.
 

3. Lantana (Lantana camara)

In third place is Lantana, this tree is often called “Tahi Ayam” in some areas because squeezing the leaves will give off an unpleasant aroma. It is also classified as a wild tree and nuisance weed which is often eradicated in rice fields. The lantana tree produces brightly colored flowers and lush berry-shaped fruit in its season which makes it suitable as an ornamental plant as well as a bonsai.

Like most other nuisance trees, lantana is also a strong tree and difficult to kill, even though it is cut to the base, it can produce new shoots and come back to life. Due to its high survival rate, this tree is perfect for those of you who are just starting to plant trees for bonsai.

You can look for this tree in dry gardens or on the edges of rice fields because it loves dry, open areas that are in the sun all day long.
 

4. Sensitive Plant (Mimosa pudica)

Is it true that the sensitive plant is embarrassed to be made into bonsai?

Many common people assume that this weed only has a trunk the size of a very small, but in the wild, it can grow with a trunk the size of an thumb, even though one this size is rarely found due to the difficulty of finding the base of the sensitive plant covered in thick branches of twigs. makes it difficult to see the center.

But the bonsai trend, which has recently gone viral, proves that many bonsai enthusiasts already have a big sensitive plant and it looks very pretty placed in small pots with dense foliage and round-shaped flowers that are bright pink.

To find this one weed, you can look for it in a slightly arid area such as on the edge of a large field. They are hard to find in damp places.
 

5. Flowering Weeds/Grass

Some many flowering weeds and grasses can be planted as ornamental plants in pots as well as impressive bonsai, you know.

You can use any type of weed or grass to make a bonsai object. However, you can make some types of selected weeds or grasses as main references such as Turnera sp. and Chrysanthemums sp.

The selection of bonsai objects from weeds is not fixed in this article, you can further explore the weed plants that you enjoy doing, and most importantly they have a long life (not annual plants) and when they are old they produce woody stems.
 

Those are 5 Nuisance Plants That Can Be Used As Bonsai Objects. You can find all of them around the settlement.

But if the wild plants you want to take is where it’s supposed to be, for example on the edge of a river or cliff, don’t pick it up. If they grow up there is precisely where they belong. There they can prevent soil erosion and prevent landslides.

Interested in planting a nuisance plant as a bonsai or ornamental plant object?