Dear All,

I am writing to ask for your advice on saving my poor Chinese Elm bonsai. I’m just a bonsai starter with a (I guess) Magnolia bonsai which is doing very strong & is always blooming .

I recently got a Chinese Elm.


I left my house for a one-week trip and when I got back I found the leaves of the Elm all dried out.


I immediately started watering & spraying it for 24 hours until I read some articles & forums advising against it & I stopped.

By the way, I naively wanted to create a greenhouse inside my house and left some pots full of water on my heater and turned it up hoping for more humidity. When I returned from my trip the place was hot and dry. The poor bonsai was only 1.5 meters away from the heater.

I am wondering if I should repot my bonsai and how. I am also attaching photos of the soil.





I am devastated and feel guilty about this. Your help will be considered a life-saving act of kindness.

Thank you all very much in advance.

Foad

[strike]You can try and repot the elm, but[/strike] it's [strike]most likely[/strike] already dead.
Cause: bad soil, too much heat, not enough water.

Thanks for the quick death announcement, Auk! But is there absolutely no way to revive the tree? I read that this type of bonsai is very tough.

It's dead. You can't revive a dead tree.

This is visible at the base of the trunk - it's shriveled up, meaning the trunk itself is dried out. The cambium will have died.

You can check by scratching the bark. If you see fresh green under it, there's still live cambium. I think you'll only find brown stuff. Even if you find green cambium, the damage is so big that it is not likely the tree will recover.

Of course you can try. Remove the old soil without further damaging the roots, put it in fresh soil, hope for the best.

Articles about repotting bonsai can easily be found using Google.

I scratched the bottom and top of the tree and I saw green bark... This is good. This is hope...

Do you have any suggestions for the soil type specifically useful for this tree? To my limited knowledge, it should be inorganic, right?

ifoad wrote: I scratched the bottom and top of the tree and I saw green bark... This is good. This is hope...

Do you have any suggestions for the soil type specifically useful for this tree? To my limited knowledge, it should be inorganic, right?

No, that's for real bonsai and more experienced bonsai-growers. For this elm I'd use standard bonsai-soil that you should be able to buy at a nursery.

BTW watering it was NOT wrong. Spraying it is not of much use though. You can soak it in water. After repotting you may want to build a sort of a greenhouse by using a plastic bag (transparent).

It will be pointless though. The tree is severely damaged and dried out. The roots will be damaged too, it has no leaves so there will be no sap flow. Good luck, anyway. If it works out, your tree will get a name: Lazarus.

Auk wrote: For this elm I'd use standard bonsai-soil that you should be able to buy at a nursery.

Changing my mind on that one. The roots will be damaged and may rot. Sphagnum seems to help. Let me Google that... hold on.

[edit]Found it:
www.bonsai4me.com/AdvTech/ATSphagnum%20Moss.htm , under 'The benefits of Sphagnum moss'[/edit]

Yeah, the elm is a goner. Toss it in the bin. No need to waste time on this. Even if you get some live out of it, it will be the very bottom of the trunk and you have nothing but a tini sprout. But, if a tree looks like that, with the main trunk shrivelled.. It is gone.

Do you have pictures of a flower of your magnolia bonsai? If you hadn't said it flowers all the time, I would have said you have a ficus ginseng there.

Where do you live ifoad? Looks so much like the sort of Elm "Bonsai" readily commercially available at garden centers here in the UK. "Mallasai" Bonsai (Bonsai with an unnatural "S" shaped trunk that had wire on it at some stage that was allowed to bite into the trunk and leave a rusty scar.

I hate those type.

Auk,
I really appreciate your going through all that stuff. I think I'll just be beating the air. However, this will leave me with a life-time lesson: never leave a living creature alone for too long with pots radiating heat on the heater!
I have some Sphagnum on my other bonsai & it's very helpful for keeping the soil humid.

Leatherback,
Thank you, but I think I'll just give the poor bonsai a proper burial rather than tossing it away!
And you're right! What I have is not a magnolia bonsai, it's a ficus ginseng. By "blooming" I meant it's always growing leaves.

BonsaiMacke,
My name's Foad (pronounced /fu:wæd/); I'm from the Kurdish region of Iran and I live in Tehran.
That's exactly where I got that bonsai from, a garden center in Tehran. Yes, the wire scar is (or was!) a pain.

Thank you all very much, guys. I will NEVER even consider buying another bonsai without consulting with experts like you. It's amazing how convenient it was to receive advice from you on this forum. Thank you Internet; thank you, bonsaiempire.com.