Picked this up at Home Depot this spring. Repotted it and did an air layer on it in the spring (already harvested). Wired it today. Got some moist sphagnum around the base of the trunk to try to encourage it to grow some banyan style exposed roots.
Lorax7 Tiger Bark Ficus #1
- Thread starter Lorax7
- Start date
giventofly
Shohin
Very nice, keep posting updates. I'm curious if you will get some good aerial roots for the banyan
Maiden69
Masterpiece
place it in a humidity tray, that will create some roots, but they will definitely don't have the appearance you are looking for. Also, it needs to be super strong for it to do it on its own. Same areas of the tree, one month apart.
July 2022
August 2022
July 2022
August 2022
luvinthemountains
Chumono
It has style! Nice job.
giventofly
Shohin
is it the right time to do a defoliation?
BrianBay9
Masterpiece
Maybe if it's going into a nice, toasty grow tent for the winter. Otherwise, I'd defoliate when moving outside in the spring, then again maybe during the hottest part of the year.
LuZiKui
Shohin
Since you're still developing your tree you may want to reconsider a full defoliation until you get all your branches sorted and are looking to maintain shape and decrease leaf size. @markyscott has what I consider to be one of the best ficus progressions on Bnut and I've been following his advice of partial defoliation for my ficus. You may find that your tree develops faster and you get some more budding lower on the tree (as well as aerial roots). You've got a cool looking tree with some nice movement at the base, interested to see it progress!
www.bonsainut.com
Developing a large Willow Leaf Ficus
... and lessons learned. This was a tree I purchased in about 2008. Being a slow learner, I wasted a lot of years of work on the tree. I defoliated it a couple of times a summer and wondered why my growth was so poor and development was so slow. Starting in 2013, I completely changed my...
I defoliated now for the following reasons:
- I just watched Tony Bebb’s ficus demo for WBC 2022 and wanted to try out the techniques I saw in the demo while they were fresh in my memory. Mr. Bebb said in the demo video that he was doing the work in Australia’s wintertime. I wasn’t concerned about the timing of my work, as I have worked on my other ficus at this time of year without issue.
- My ficus has been in full sun all summer and has been growing vigorously. I fully expect it to flush out and keep on growing pretty much as if nothing happened.
- I keep it in the corner of the basement under some fairly intense LED lights. My ficus have grown well there throughout winter during past years. I expect it will recover just fine.
- I wanted to wire the branches. This is easier to do after defoliation.
- Part of the purpose of the defoliation is to promote branching. In addition to defoliation, I cut the tip of every branch to encourage branching. (This was one of the techniques from Mr. Bebb’s demo that I wanted to try.)
- After defoliation, the new flush of leaves will be adapted to the light levels present in the indoor environment.
- I’ll probably get some backbudding further down on the trunk, which is something I desire for this tree.
- I don’t defoliate trees regularly. I mostly let them grow out and gain plenty of vigor between any major work done on them.
canoeguide
Chumono
Nice movement!
I defoliated a couple of tiger barks recently and they threw more backbuds than I knew what to do with.
I keep my tropicals outside until the low 40s at night in the fall, so they almost seem to have a second spring when they come into the 70+ degree house and sunny windows. Seems like as good a time as any for defoliation.
I defoliated a couple of tiger barks recently and they threw more backbuds than I knew what to do with.
I keep my tropicals outside until the low 40s at night in the fall, so they almost seem to have a second spring when they come into the 70+ degree house and sunny windows. Seems like as good a time as any for defoliation.
giventofly
Shohin
Now I want to try all those things too
To clarify:Now I want to try all those things too
It is undoubtedly true that, as suggested by others, spring or summer is a more ideal time of year to do this kind of work. I don't dispute that at all. I was simply listing the reasons why I chose to go ahead and do this bit of off-season work anyway. Ficus are an extraordinarily resilient genus and that is why I can do this and get away with it. Anyway, thought I should state that for the record so I'm not leading you astray.
giventofly
Shohin
I wasn't going to do them all at the moment, but at least the tip cut I'm going to do
Yeah, when he explained what he was doing with the tip cut in his demo, I was like,”Ooh! That might be a really important secret that I did not know anything about. Must try.” He said that if you don’t cut all the branch tips everywhere on the tree, you don’t get the branching response. The tree will just elongate the existing tips. When you cut all the tips, the tree responds with side branching.
giventofly
Shohin
By any change you got the video of Tony Bebb at hand ?
Sorry, I don’t have it. It was his demo for the World Bonsai Convention. There was a fee for registration for the virtual convention and, thus, the content was paywalled for registered attendees only. Also, the content was only available during a specified time window, which has ended.
giventofly
Shohin
Sure, no problem, thanks. I googled for it but couldn't find anything so kind of assumed it was something like that.
LuZiKui
Shohin
That seems to make sense. Do you know was he more in a refining stage with his tree or does he recommend that for trees that are still in development where you're just looking for growth? Thanks!
The ficus he was working on was yamadori, so it wasn’t in development from the point of view of growing out for trunk girth, etc., but I believe it was the first styling of that tree since collection. So, it certainly wasn’t end-stage refinement. I guess I would call it in development, even though it is certainly far more developed than any ficus in my collection. Ultimately, I think it boils down to the question: Is your tree far enough along that starting to build ramification is among your current goals?
