Ginseng Ficus - Flat Cut Fun

[SilverShoe99]

In August of last year I wondered what would happen if I took a Ginseng Ficus and completely lopped the tuber roots off. I recall that I had read somewhere that folks had had some success doing just that, so I figured I'd try it for myself. I thought it'd be a fun way to see if I couldn't cheat my way to a nice wide nebari.

I went out and bought myself a ginseng ficus that I thought might be a good candidate. This is the tree I ended up with:





I picked this tree in particular, planning to saw it perfectly flat right where the rocks were glued on. That way I'd have a head start on building a nebari, since the roots were almost perfectly circular at that level.

The next step was to get the tree out of the muck it was planted in, which involved busting through the glued on gravel with a hammer. Unfortunately, no pics of that part of the process. But, once I got the tree out of the pot, this is what I found:



Ridiculous. Anyways, I took out my saw, got to work, and this is what I ended up with:







A perfectly flat cut right where the soil line was when I bought it.

The plan was to keep this as a small tree so I put it into a small terracotta bulb pot in hopes of developing a nice, shallow, radial root system.



Filled the pot up with more soil



And stuck it in my "greenhouse" to recover and grow out.

 

[SilverShoe99]

The recovery and grow out didn't exactly go as planned. Here is the tree as of this morning:





As you can see, the tree didn't grow a whole lot over the course of the last year. I think there are a few factors that contributed to this: 1) that "greenhouse" doesn't really do anything in terms of holding in heat and humidity, but it sure does a good job blocking sunlight; 2) I accidentally jostled the tree pretty good taking it out of the greenhouse, and as it wasn't tied in (I know, I know) it got pretty well shaken up; 3) somehow, one side of the base of the tree ended up completely above the soil, and as such just calloused over and didn't grow any roots.





The tree felt secure enough, so I know the other side had rooted, but I wanted to get this tree back on track in terms of developing a fully radial rootbase. So, I decided to repot the tree to get it back on track.

Here is it out of the pot - the side that did grow roots did a good job, enough to hold the substrate together:



Here's the substrate I used raked out, still in pretty good shape. I don't remember exactly what I used, or the ratios, but looks like akadama, perlite, and scoria:



And now the guts of the thing, the barerooted tree in all its, uh....glory?









You can pretty clearly see the side that had worked its way out of the soil and how it had just calloused over instead of growing any roots.

 

[SilverShoe99]

I figured that if I just repotted the tree as is, the roots that had grown would keep developing, and the areas that had just calloused over would just keep....being calluses. So I used my knob cutters to take a few bites out of the scarred over areas on the circumference of the rootbase in hopes that it would encourage new roots to grow from those areas.





Next I prepped my pot. I decided to use the same one as last year, but made sure to properly secure my screen and wire in the tree this time.





Since the pot only has one drainage hole, I used a little trick I picked up (probably from one of the posts on B-nut) and made myself a little cotter-pin anchor to give myself something to secure the tie-down wires to:

 

[SilverShoe99]

Pot's ready, so I laid down a base layer of soil (used the same soil it had been planted in last year):



Applied some rooting hormone gel to the "bites" I took out of the calloused rootbase:







Tied the tree down flush with the soil, making sure there were no air pockets directly under the rootbase:





And finally filled in the rest of the soil and chopsticked it in.



And....voila! It's not much to look at yet, but it's been a fun project so far and I'm hopeful that with better horticultural care it'll grow much more in the next 12 months than it did over the last 12.

 

[Forsoothe!]

At the risk of alienating some people without any taste in grace and beauty, you have taken ugly and spent a year making more ugly. I don't know whether I'm supposed to laugh or puke. Ginseng ficus, whatever the hell that is, is to bonsai what Rubens is to thighs.

 

[SilverShoe99]

I'm not blind, I have noticed its striking resemblance to this -

But I've learned that you can indeed flat cut a ficus and treat the whole thing like a cutting, I managed to create the wide rootbase I hoped for, and seeing as it's a ficus and it'll grow like a weed in my climate, I'm optimistic I can make a half decent canopy out of this in the years to come.

 

[Carol 83]

I cut most of the tubes off of the ugly one my brother gave me, and buried the rest. It had some aerial roots, plus he was trying to be nice so I had to try and do something with it. It's still nothing very good, but it's better than it was.

 

[Eckhoffw]

I love your documentation on this.
interested In its progression for sure!
my only hang up is that you still have the graft to look at.

 

[cdefoe]

Ginseng ficus, whatever the hell that is, is to bonsai what Rubens is to thighs.

to be fair, rubens must have seen something beautiful in those ladies' thighs... he sure painted a lot of them