DWARFING. -- In some cases, where there is very little room, it may be desirable to know how to obtain dwarf trees; though generally speaking, they are, like all unnatural objects, in bad taste, and rather disagreeable than pleasing.  Wherever Chinese buildings are introduced, however, a few dwarf-stunted elms in China vases should be placed near them; as in China it is said that no garden is considered complete without several of these little monsters [sic].  The mode of making them is to take a ring of bark off one of the branches of a full grown Elm tree, and to surround it with earth wrapped in moss, which should be kept constantly moist, by water being thrown on it several times a day, or by a vessel being suspended over it, so contrived that the water may ooze out a drop at a time, and thus be continually and regularly falling on the moss.
       In the course of a few weeks, the branch will have thrown out roots : and when this is supposed to be the case, it should be detached from the parent tree, and planted with the moss still round it in a small pot in very poor soil ; as soon as it begins to grow, it should be shifted into another pot a little larger ; and this shifting should be repeated several times, into larger and larger pots, always using poor stony, or gravelly soil, and giving the plant very little water.  Thus treated, the plant will soon become a little stunted tree, bearing all the marks of old age ; and looking like a poor, decrepit, old man, bent double with age.  It is obvious that other forest-trees might be dwarfed in the same manner ; so that a miniature forest might easily be formed, the Oaks assuming a gnarled and rugged character, and bearing acorns, and the Pines and Firs with rough furrowed bark, and covered with cones, and yet the whole not above two feet high.
       (Three additional paragraphs then discuss other dwarfing methods used for other and non-Asian plants.)  1 

1       Loudon, Jane (Webb)  The Ladies' Companion to the Flower Garden, Being An Alphabetical Arrangement of All the Ornamental Plants Usually Grown in Gardens and Shrubberies, with Full Directions For Their Culture (London: Bradbury and Evans; 1841, 1865. Eighth Edition, Considerably Enlarged and Corrected to the Present Time by Charles Edmonds, F.R.H.S., Gardener to Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland, Chiswick House), pp.102-103.