The ancient art of growing Bonsai trees is well over a thousand years old. The word bonsai is a loanword from Japanese that is used as a verb to describe the art of raising miniaturized trees through pruning
and training.
The word is also commonly used as a noun to describe the resulting plants. Bonsai is actually the combination of two words: bon, meaning container or dish, and sai, meaning tree. The words combine to mean something like “tree in a shallow container.”