Chinese Ash started getting imported at Lodder Bonsai here in The Netherlands a couple of years ago. I’ve had limited success with European Ash and figured these would the same nonsense so largely ignored them. Any way, eventually I spotted a pretty one and bought it just to try it out. Well it survived a winter outside and turned out to be a very very nice species to work with – even in very small sizes.

This year there were a lot more of them available and I ended up buying eight shohins. Here is the first – it’s approximately 16cm – just over 6 inches.

Here's the sequence from when I bought it in March through to November. You'll note that I even repotted it a second time into a better pot (Slovakian handmade).

Jerry, those are interesting little trees, and quite nice. They appear to be able togetquite twiggy (ramified) very quickly. I ad always thought of Ash as medium to large trees because of thegrowth pattern, your trees make the possibility of shohin look very much a reaonable goal. Thanks! John

Here's another one bought last year:

Well this years batch arrived at the bonsai place - so I again picked out what I thought were the best. They had a few hundred in, maybe 500-700 of them. I found 6 decent ones and bought them.
Here we go - first some small ones 6 inch high in 4 inch pots and then some larger ones 8 inch high 6 inch pots:

Crazy.  I'd skipped this post because it had the "ash" word in it, amazing ramification for something you'd think of as a very coarse tree.

Updates are always nice. I continue to love these little Chinese Ash.

They're not like any of my Chinese elms :-)

The last pot is a cheap Chinese ting and cost only $3.

By shortening, do you mean planting it deeper in the pot?

Looking at it in this photo, I think you're right. Looks like some of the fine akadama has washed out from between the roots leaving them somewhat exposed.

I have an album of that particular tree here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/norbury/sets/72157625467685862

I can see that they were not previously so exposed and it looked better for it.