I got this bonsai for free!

Well, not quite. It was a raffle prize at my local bonsai club, and it didn't look anywhere near this good when I got it. First, a word about bonsai clubs: If you are a beginner, you should join one. Don't be shy, clubs are the best resource in the world for a hobby like bonsai. Aside from having more established members willing to share their expertise, (and the opportunity to hang with some of the nicest people in the world) you can get free stuff.

All established bonsai people have an area of their yard devoted to surplus trees that they bought for projects that never materialized, or grew from cuttings taken from a larger bonsai, or grew from seeds, or started to work on but the tree just did not inspire them and they want to pass it on to someone who will be more in tune with it.

This olive tree was a little rooted cutting in a four inch pot, and all it had was the bottom part of the trunk you see up to the first branch (but it was a lot smaller), and that had a couple of sprigs of green on top of it. I repotted it in a larger pot (had learned that much by then) and started working on bulking it up a little, because I knew then that olive bonsais were expensive and I could not afford to buy one.

Fast forward about two years, and it had rapidly built the upper branch structure you see now, and I was getting ready to sell it or put it back in the raffle (I had found a larger olive tree to work on) and my wife absolutely would not let me sell or give away this little tree, so it became hers.

One final note: Olives only bear fruit on wood that is a few years old, and last year, this tree bore fruit -- one little olive at the top of the tree -- for the first time.