I’ll speak for myself alone when I say I just fundamentally dislike succulent plants full stop, so unlikely a jade will be in my sphere of growing. That’s not to say I can’t appreciate the tree or all the work involved in growing it of course, I 100% do, just I’m not going to be personally growing jade.
Here (Australia) we don’t have the aspect of it being a traditional part of the culture surrounding bonsai that Japan/ China do, so we tend to be quite unrestricted by what constitutes a bonsai. Native species/ jade/ traditional species/ 10cm tall or 1m tall if it’s in a container and has a sense of scale then yep she’s a bonsai.
There will always be a part of any hobby that is elitist; where a subset of people think they alone know exactly what box a tree must fit in to qualify. Fortunately it’s a relatively small number of people.
Grow what you like, what you enjoy and what you are good at growing (these 3 don’t always line up
) and don’t stress if your interests aren’t to grow traditional species like Japanese Black Pine or Japanese Maple.
Without people wanting to grow different species we’d all turn up to club shows and have 200 pines to look at which would be boring AF
In the blue darkening sky, the moon paints a pine tree.
