Larch

While growing very young seedlings or cuttings, a small pot is ideal. Once you begin developing the trunk in earnest, it is best to move the tree to the ground, or a nursery basket, to develop a strong root system and drive growth.

Larch's don't tend to thicken trunks once they are in bonsai pots and in later stages of development, so ensure the trunk is where you want it before reducing the root mass.

With a larch, you want to complete phase 1 (trunk building) before moving on, because they won't continue to thicken once the focus changes to branch building. To thicken and grow the trunk, you want long growths with lots of needles, which can grow to 4ft+. Pruning will be done less often, for a couple reasons: to ensure light is reaching the base and bottom of the tree to avoid needles dying out. You may also decide to cut back growing tips of shoots at the apex to encourage the main leader to be lower on the trunk line, contributing to taper. And where multiple shoots are growing from the same spot on the trunk line, prune back to only two new shoots to avoid reverse taper and bulging.

Once the trunk is where you want it, select the primary branch locations. New shoots will tend to grow on the buds closest to the pruning point on a branch. So if there is a shoot where you want it, and the internodes are not too long between the buds, prune back to the first two buds. Repeat this to build ramification. If the inter-nodes are too long, there are usually buds where a shoot emerges. You can prune the shoot all the way back and encourage growth from there, trying for more beneficial bud placements. You'll want to allow lower branches to grow longer to build thickness, while pruning all apex branches to redirect that energy and avoid apex elongation.

Once you are refining and maintaining with the branch structure mostly done, the goal is to continue tight ramification with short inter-nodes. Similar to phase 2, if the buds are not in the right place, prune the new shoot to the first bud only, or off entirely back to the buds at its base, and try again. This can take multiple tries, pruning a single tree multiple times per year, with only a small percentage of the new growth's buds in positions worth keeping.