With an attitude like that your right it will never be one. With proper technique and an imagination you can make something nice in time. Look up rhe definition of bonsai.

cwillette1994 wrote: With an attitude like that your right it will never be one. With proper technique and an imagination you can make something nice in time. Look up rhe definition of bonsai.

This is an almost dead ficus, that is not
A bonsai and has no bonsai potentialm, in the hands of someone who does not know what bonsai is and does not know bonsai techniqueds.

This specific plant will never be a bonsai and that has ecactly nothing to do with my attitude.

cwillette1994 wrote: With an attitude like that your right it will never be one. With proper technique and an imagination you can make something nice in time. Look up rhe definition of bonsai.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t have any proper imagination or technique on my head to make something Bonsai-ish from those mass produced poor things with those giant, swelled roots (even when the grafted part is dead and just the rootstock sprouting, like here). Bonsais have proportion rules. If you have an idea/technique to make it something what looks close to a bonsai, don’t hesitate. Or you’ll be convinced, or us.

cwillette1994 wrote: With proper technique and an imagination you can make something nice in time.

With a proper plant, maybe. With this one, no way.

cwillette1994 wrote: Look up rhe definition of bonsai.

Sorry to ask you, but two questions:
1- How long have you been training plants to become bonsai?
2- Could you define bonsai as you see fit?

No need to be so rude, but thanks all the same - just wanted opinions on the state of the branches. I now have some. All the best.

The branches are probably dead.

Char_sw wrote: No need to be so rude, but thanks all the same - just wanted opinions on the state of the branches. I now have some. All the best.

I wasn’t rude and never meant to be. You can make a bonsai from a seed with time and proper everything, but me I couldn’t from this Ficus monsters.

Clicio wrote: The branches are probably dead.

Looks like the microcarpa/retusa/other Ficus, what was grafted in the “rootstock” is dead and the plant (?) which used as rootstock still living.

1.) 18 years
2.) look up the definition of what bonsai means. I’ll do it for you: first the Japanese literal meaning “planted in a container” or “landscape in a pot” and then there’s the adapted translation or meaning “a shrub or tree planted in a small pot that is prevented from reaching its normal size”.

In MY opinion you can turn most any tree or shrub in to a bonsai. I have many scheflerra’s, ginseng ficus, golden gate ficus, azalea, gardenia, etc. bonsai. I guess I just think of it in a different way. But that’s okay of course. Just as your own interpretation of bonsai is. But I tend to see potential in any type of plant/tree/shrub.

cwillette1994 wrote: 1.) 18 years

What I do not understand is, if you hsve 18 year experience, why don't you hsve a picture of a good bonsai you have created as your avatar?

cwillette1994 wrote: 18 years

your name has 1994 in it. if you were born in 94' that means you been training plants to become bonsai since 6yrs old.