Reddit reviews The Complete Book of Bonsai: A Practical Guide to Its Art and Cultivation

Harry Tomlinson - here - also this

Harry Harrington - basics

Shipping a tropical tree in winter is a terrible idea. If temps drop and shipping gets delayed (both likely around Christmas), you end up receiving a very dead tree.

The only way I'd get a tropical right now is if I could go to an actual garden center/greenhouse and buy one that I could see and immediately take home with me that day.

And as the guy who wrote that wiki page on gifting trees - my strongest possible recommendation is to buy her some really nice bonsai books instead, or a bonsai class in the spring if there's a place near you that offers them.

• This is a good book
  
  
• So is this.
  
  
• And this one too.
  
  You can even make it a couple's project to go and pick out some nursery stock in the spring (or a finished tree, if you prefer) and work on it together. Or you could buy two seats to that bonsai class instead of one.
  

The internet is an excellent place, and honestly I would start with subreddits. Once you have exhausted their FAQ's, there are a lot of books on bonsai, I really like The Complete Book of Bonsai. It is the only non-internet, non-human rescource I have needed. Great guides on every aspect of raising, buying, and caring for a bonsai. Your best bet would be to do some preliminary research and talk to someone at a nursery with bonsai. With beekeeping, I cannot state how beneficial a local beekeeper was for me. I offered to work for free for a weekend and learned more in one day than I had from almost all the internet. I guess I would say do research online, find out basically how they work, then get out there and see it! You will probably make a few small mistakes early on, but just having a person to talk to helps greatly. Hope I helped and keep the questions coming.

ha "winter" you don't know winter! :) you can grow almost anything where you are.

a bonsai is a bad idea as a gift, but a bonsai book is a good idea. i got a bonsai4me book by harry harrington (www.bonsai4me.com) on my kindle, and read a lot of stuff online but this book has been suggested.

bonsai's can literally last 100's of years, some are older than Canada and Australia. the most satisfying result i get from having one is watching it grow and the transformation that occurs yearly. The downsides are, if i was to go away for 3 weeks i would need to worry about my trees, but it's possible to leave them with proper precautions. I inspect my trees daily in the summer to make sure they're watered and pest free, so there is a daily time commitment that's required, in the winter we have snow here and most of them get buried in it, i hardly see my trees from dec-feb :)

so just to recap, don't buy a tree as a gift. A good bonsai book will be an eye opener to anyone that's interested in bonsai but has never dived in. good luck!

Check the links on the sidebar ->

For now I will give a couple quick answers....

-I have never done seeds, so I don't know of the best seed places.

-There are no "good indoor deciduous trees." Deciduous means that a tree loses it's leaves seasonally. You can't have a tree like that indoors because when they aren't exposed to the temp changes outside, they will just die. I will go ahead and assume you meant "I want a tree with regular leafing, not needles, etc." In that case you can't go wrong with a ficus (benjamina or microcarpa would be good).

-For materials your really jumping-the-gun. At best you might need a small pot or series of small pots for your seeds, and soil. Before the seeds pop, a fluorescent light. Then it will be another 2 years at LEAST before you need to look into bigger pots, tools, wiring, etc.

-Same goes with root pruning. You are years away from that.

-For book, you don't NEED one. I have only ever had one. Nearly all the info it contains is available in the links on the sidebar, or in several bonsai forums, but the pictures are inspiring. The author also created a smaller and cheaper book with just the general stuff.