The Japanese pruning or creation of a Niwaki is an ancestral art whose foundations come essentially from the Shinto cult "The Way of the Gods", which was maintained and transmitted from the 12th century by the Zen Buddhist gardening monks, and whose primary goal is to obtain an impression of maturity in a subject.
Originally, Niwaki evokes the imprint left on the vegetation by natural elements (wind, snow, frost...) or animals (cattle, insects...).
There are big nurseries in Japan, breeding and pruning this kind of trees, and they are passed on from generation to generation.
Among the different types of Japanese pruning (compact karikomi, in the form of large bushes kokarikomi or small bushes okarikomi, linear "in plateaus" or "in tiers"...) the "in clouds" pruning is intended to give a tabular vegetation - various shapes in multiple domes - aiming at reproducing distant landscape sites.
Niwaki allows to represent hills and valleys of the countryside, to evoke clouds hanging in the depth of a forest or a tree isolated in the plumb of a cliff, this in the Japanese garden where all the elements are used to reproduce the whole natural landscape in a small space, in order to sublimate its beauty.
Japanese pruning is for all varieties of trees (except the most slender ones such as candle cypress or poplar) and shrubs, whether deciduous or evergreen, and for all subjects, from the smallest raised in a pot - for those who would not be lucky enough to have a garden - to the one raised in the ground.
