Dear All,
Almost exactly a year ago, I bought a ficus at Lodder, one of Europe's largest bonsai traders. It was one of those "one of 10.000" trees, so nothing spectacular or interesting about it. Just my curiosity: Can one actually create an interesting tree from such material. I already have
a longer thread on the Dutch version of this forum
but I thought I'd share it here too.
As purchased:
After ourchase, I removed all bar-branches, clumps etc and repotted it, taking off most of the roots (Many of which were in bad state anyway). I wired the whole tree i a very loose manner, with long wires: This to allow me to loop the wire around the extending bracnhes during winter.
So, after filling up with substrate, I moved it indoors, and left it to grow for winter. Initial plant:
About a month ago I removed all foliage, in order to get some side-branches going: The branches were getting really long, but without any ramnification. It worker wonders. The tree is now green-ish again. It will be left to grwo the whole winter. If the main branches have thickened enough after that, I will trim all of them back to perhaps 3, 4 cm and let them grow out in order to create taper in the branches. In between I will prune to top, to keep branches there thinner than those below.
Today: