BonsaiSimby Shining Muffin LLC

Gallery

These are not illustrations. Every picture here is a frame of the running simulator, photographed inside the app. Nobody modelled these trees — the simulation grew them, one day at a time, from a seed.

A fourteen-year-old Japanese maple bonsai in broom style, bare in winter, in a blue rectangular pot, with copper wire on the lower branches.
Fourteen years, winter. Broom style, in a one-litre pot. Winter is when a bonsai is judged: with the leaves gone, what is left is the ramification, the taper of the trunk and every decision you made on the way up. The copper is wire still set on the lower branches.
The same broom-style Japanese maple bonsai in full summer leaf, green, in a blue rectangular pot.
Fourteen years, summer. In full leaf. The canopy is not a texture draped over the branches: each leaf hangs off a node the tree actually made, and the ones inside the crown sit in the shade the outer ones cast.
The same broom-style Japanese maple bonsai turning colour in autumn, leaves going from green to orange, in a blue rectangular pot.
Fourteen years, autumn. Acer palmatum is grown for this. The turn is not uniform, and it is not supposed to be: the leaves that caught the most sun go first.

Want one of your own?

You start with a seedling and about ten seconds of instructions. What it looks like in fourteen years is up to you.

Open the simulator →