Ficus Pumila Bonsai Failure

I was really proud when I created a mame bonsai from a Ficus Pumila cutting a few years ago. So much so that I even put it on show once. At the time it looked something like this:

November 2015 (with apple to show the size)

Growth was a little sparse, but I hoped for improvement in the years to come.

Unfortunately it's been all downhill since then. By April 2018 the leader had died and it had deteriorated to this:

April 2018 - after some damaged branches had been removed

With too many trees to care for I never got around to trying any of the options I referred to in my April 2018 update.

Instead it's largely been left to do its only thing. When I checked up on it a few days ago, it was seriously overgrown, with long branches which had rooted themselves into the pots of the Bougainvillea and succulent standing beside it.

After separation the Bougainvillea has two new Ficus Pumila plants growing in its pot.

The one of the right has grown up the trunk of the Bougainvillea and the two appear to have fused together.

As it's autumn in South Africa I don't want to do any repotting now, so I'll have to sort this mess out in spring.

And then there's the overgrown Ficus Pumila (no longer worthy of the name bonsai).

After shortening the long branches, a problem becomes visible.

The extent of the problem is much more obvious from the back.

The twisty trunk I worked so hard to create is dead. All the growth is coming from the first inch of the trunk.

Again I'll wait until spring before making any final decisions, but I think that this is a lost cause as bonsai. I'll probably give the plant away and keep the pot.

I still have to work out whether I can do anything with the two larger Ficus Pumila plants that appeared in the April 2018 update.

Fortunately the tiny Ficus Burtt-Davyi that appeared in that post is showing a lot more promise.

I Still Like Small Trees, But...

One of my early posts, entitled "I Like Small Trees", was about a tiny Ficus Pumila bonsai which I grew from a cutting.

November 2015 (with apple to show the size)

I still have that little tree but it's proving to be a lot more trouble than it's worth.

As Ficus Pumila is a creeper, the branches grow out long and twisty with very little ramification and I have to prune this one frequently to have any hope of maintaining its shape.

But the problems don't end there. Branches grow out so thin (about the thickness of my thinnest bonsai wire) that wiring them is a really risky business. In January, while removing wire, the leader snapped off and the remaining stub has since died back, leaving me with two branches growing in opposite directions and no apex. What looks like upward growth in this photo is actually a back branch.

April 2018 - Not looking too good after it's latest haircut!

Two months later the only solution I can see is to change the potting angle to bring the right branch more upright.

I've been trying to work out how to improve the balance of the tree and came up with two options:

Part of left branch removed in Photoshop

Option 1 would require wiring that back branch upwards, something which may or may not work.

Entire left branch removed in Photoshop

My inclination is to go with the more minimalist second option, but I won't be making any decisions until I see what new growth I get.

I still like small trees and hope to create others that size, but using more suitable material. I already have one tiny Ficus Burtt-Davyi in training and I may chop some of my cuttings to create a few more.

Ficus Burtt-Davyi - fatter, but about the same height

As for the plants that were the result of deconstructing my Ficus Pumila houseplant in December 2016, I've already given some of them away but I'm not planning to give up on all of them just yet.

I'm trying to see how much I can fatten up the biggest one so I'm not doing much to it right now. Of course the height will have to come down eventually, and I can already see a potential new leader, but that chop is a long way off.

April 2018 - wired upwards to help with trunk thickening

I'm not quite sure how the one below will work out though because it's always going to be short and fat:

April 2018

The growth is a bit "all over the place" so I guess in time one root and some of the branches will have to go.

Deconstructed Ficus Pumila - six months later

In December 2016 I decided to see if I could turn my Ficus Pumila houseplant into bonsai material.

After trimming off all the excess growth and dividing up the root ball I was left with these seven small plants:

Deconstructed plant - December 2016

At that stage I simply left them to grow, and six months later they have put out a mass of new growth:

Deconstructed plant - six months later

Until this week the only work I'd done was to wire the leader of the cascading plant in an upright direction.

Cascading - December 2016

The same plant wired upright - July 2017

Hopefully that will help to thicken the trunk eventually though Ficus Pumila doesn't seen to thicken easily.

As trunk development is my major goal right now I still haven't done any pruning of substance, merely cutting off a few dead twigs and one small branch that was growing across itself. I also tried to untangle the branches but as they’re far too thin for wiring I’m sure they’ll soon get tangled up again.

I'm reasonably happy with that one's progress. I'm less happy with this one:

December 2016

It had put out a lot of new growth too:

July 2017 - before pruning

Sadly when I starting digging around underneath all that foliage I discovered that one major branch had died. To make matters worse, while cutting that off, one of the thinner branches got caught in the back of my branch cutter - a mistake I’ve now made several times. Will I ever learn?

In the end I cut this one back pretty hard as most of the new growth was in unwanted areas.

July 2017 - after pruning

Time to let it grow again and see what options it offers me.

Ficus Pumila has a tendency to ground layer itself. Some of the remaining plants are already doing that, which means they'll probably have to be deconstructed again if they're ever going to be bonsai. As I’ve got so many trees to take care of I didn’t have time to have a proper look at those right now. I suspect some may be looking for new homes in spring.

Turning these into bonsai isn't going to be as easy as I'd hoped. I like small trees but I’m starting to think these may be a bit too small.

Deconstructing a Ficus Pumila Houseplant

My smallest tree is this little Ficus Pumila which I grew from a cutting several years ago.

Ficus Pumila - November 2015

The parent plant was one I bought to use as material for cuttings but, given the slow growth of my little tree, I only ever propagated two more cuttings from it and I gave both of those away a long time ago.

My initial plan was to keep the parent plant as a houseplant but it was never happy indoors, so I soon decided to move it outside for the summer months, bringing it back inside as soon as the nights got chilly. Even that proved problematic though as it always suffered a lot of die-back while indoors, so last winter I moved it into my greenhouse instead and it's been thriving there over the last few months.

And that was the way I intended it to stay until I came across a post about a Ficus Pumila bonsai at Reddit a few days ago. The one in that post is a lot larger than mine and seeing it made me wonder if I could use a piece of my houseplant to create a bigger bonsai.

Ficus Pumila houseplant

And so began the hard job of untangling and pruning this mess to see what useful trunks I could find.

Close-up before pruning

Given Ficus Pumila's propensity for layering itself there were stems aplenty, though only two had any substance. Still, once I started separating them, I didn't want to kill any so I felt obliged to repot them all. I ended up with six individual plants of various sizes and potted the remaining fragments as a clump in one small pot. Maybe I'll try to fuse those together later on.

Divided and potted up

This is the fattest one.

It will almost certainly become another mame.

This one is slightly thinner but has better potential to make a larger tree, especially if I wire the cascading section upwards.

I'll probably do a little wiring to the two biggest ones once they're settled in their new pots. Other than that I'll just leave them to grow for a while.

This is definitely going to be a long, slow project, but in time I should be able to produce something much more interesting than the unruly plant I started out with. Assuming they survive, that is.

I Like Small Trees

Tiny Ficus Pumila bonsai

Given the fact that I write a bonsai blog, some people would say that my title is simply stating the obvious. After all, aren't all bonsai small trees? The bonsai enthusiast, however, will be well aware that bonsai come in many sizes, from trees that are small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand to trees that require four or more people to move them.

I've opted to only grow trees that I'm capable of moving unassisted. As a small woman that's quite limiting. I wasn't too happy the day I took one of my biggest trees for critique at our club and the man giving the crit referred to it as a small tree. Then again, most of his trees are so big that he couldn't possibly move them on his own.

But that isn't really the subject of this post. Today I'm talking about miniature bonsai, otherwise known as mame. These little trees are no more than four inches tall. I just measured the little tree in this photo and it's exactly four inches tall. It's the smallest tree I own, making it my only mame, though I'm planning to create a few more, and they'll definitely be fatter than this one. If I can get it right, they may be shorter too.

This little guy is a Ficus Pumila, which is actually a vine, not a tree. I started it by rooting a cutting from a larger house plant, not realising how slowly these plants thicken in a pot. Once I discovered this, it was obvious that the bonsai I developed would be a tiny one.

Because of its size, this tree is a permanent resident in my greenhouse. There are two reasons that I'm not prepared to leave it outside:

1. On hot summer days the soil would dry out really quickly, meaning I'd need to water it several times a day to keep it alive. In the sheltered environment of my greenhouse I can get away with watering it once a day.
2. We often get hail where I live, and one occasion, just as I was getting serious about bonsai, we had hail the size of golf balls. A repeat of that would damage my bigger trees, but it would totally destroy this one. I'm not prepared to risk it.

From an aesthetic point of view this tree would probably look better in a shallower pot, but I chose this one based on practical considerations. I'm not sure how long I'd be able to keep it alive in something smaller.

Just as an illustration of the size of this tree, here's a photo of it standing beside an apple.

Tiny Ficus Pumila bonsai standing beside an apple

Linking up with NF Trees n Bushes.