An Indoor Disaster

No, I don't keep any of my trees indoors. I learnt a long time ago that even trees which can survive in my house will never thrive there. But that didn't stop me wanting a few house plants. And given my love of ficuses, Ficus Elastica seemed like a good choice.

For the last couple of years I've had two of them living opposite an east-facing window in my kitchen, not the ideal spot, but a lot better than my big Schefflera's previous home in an area which never sees the sun.

They've been growing... really slowly. Having started out as straight trunks with no branches, in time each grew one thin branch, though the dark one is showing signs that it may soon grow a few more. However the variegated plant has been looking quite fragile for a long time.

Perhaps some of the variation in their performance is down to genetic differences because variegated plants often seem to be less vigorous than their plainer counterparts, but I suspect that the main cause is the soil they've been growing in. The dark one, which I grew from a cutting, is in my club's bonsai soil while the variegated one is still in the soil it was living in when I bought it. That soil is a lot finer and probably retains a lot more water.

Seeing their poor growth I've been planning to move them to a shady spot outside. Just as soon as spring arrives.

In the meanwhile I recently bought a couple of spouts with tiny holes which, when screwed onto a bottle of water and inserted into the soil, work as a form of drip irrigation. I thought they'd simplify my life a bit as I wouldn't have to water my house plants as often, nor have to empty run off water from their saucers.

Bad idea!

I first tried "planting" my bottle of water in the pot with bonsai soil and within minutes water was pouring out of the bottom, filling up the saucer. This was not supposed to happen.

I moved the bottle into the other pot. Success. It took a few weeks for the little bottle of water to empty. Then it was time to refill it.

That's when disaster struck.

After a small knock to the shelf on which the plants were standing, the weight of the water bottle caused the variegated plant to overbalance and it went crashing down onto a lower shelf beside it. In its weakened state a fall of a mere two feet was enough to cause the apex to snap off, leaving a straight trunk with one branch low down. The plant also came out of its pot, along with half its soil. Clearly there weren't enough roots to hold it all together. Maybe some of the roots had rotted from all that water.

Within days the remaining leaves were wilting and I really feared for its survival.

Variegated plant in serious trouble

In a last ditch effort to save it I moved it into my greenhouse, hoping that better light would help it to recover, but even then I had my doubts. Now, less than three weeks later, all the remaining leaves have fallen off, so I've lost all hope.

As for the dark plant, I've started taking it outside on warm winter days so that it can build up its tolerance to the sun while it's not too harsh. Then in summer it will become a permanent outdoor plant.

Dark plant looking reasonably healthy

Unsuitable Material for Bonsai

When I first became interested in bonsai (long before I joined my club), it was with the expectation of keeping my trees indoors. This idea seemed perfectly feasible given the fact that one of the first bonsai books I bought was "Indoor Bonsai" by Paul Lesniewicz.

Unfortunately my first attempts soon ended in disaster. I even managed to kill my first Ficus really quickly. But I kept trying. And an idea from that book which seemed like an attractive option was propagating my own trees from the seeds of some of the fruit I ate.

My first attempt was planting citrus seeds. I soon had two little lemon trees growing on my bedroom windowsill. However after the more attractive one died, I aborted that experiment and planted the surviving one in the garden where it lived happily for several years before the bugs attacked it. Seeing it shrinking due to die back, my idea of turning it into a bonsai tree was revived and a couple of years ago I asked our garden service to dig it up so that I could move it into a training pot. Sadly it didn't survive the transplant and I now have a dead stump for which I'd like to find a creative use.

Dead lemon tree

I still have a couple of smaller citrus trees living in my bonsai area, but I don't have much hope of ever turning those into decent bonsai either and have made no serious attempt at styling them. They're over a decade old now, so sentiment prevents me from giving them away.

My next attempt was propagating a litchi tree. It didn't take me long to realise that the foliage was totally unsuited to bonsai, but I've kept the tree in the hope that it will give me fruit one day.

I also tried guavas, but I gave those away a long time ago.

I still have a couple of apple saplings which were another bad choice. I've since bought a couple of crab apple trees which I'm working on, but I've yet to see any fruit or even flowers on those. But I know that they're decent bonsai material so styling is my first priority for now. And I really hope they will get fruit when the time is right.

By the time I decided to plant a mango seed I had no delusions that it would ever make bonsai, but I couldn't resist the temptation to grow my own mangoes. I've actually got two trees now because a couple of years later I found a seed which had already rooted inside the mango and I didn't have the heart to throw it away if it wanted to live that badly.

My older mango tree

My older tree is approximately seven years old now and I was delighted to see that it's starting to flower for the first time.

Mango flower buds

Sadly I've read that it's best to remove the first season's flowers. I'm reluctant to do so, but the health of the tree must be my first priority, so I guess I'll be waiting for fruit for a little while longer.

Meanwhile I do have one fruit tree which I'm hoping will eventually make decent bonsai - a cherry tree.

Cherry tree

This was one of my most difficult attempts at propagating trees from fruit - of nine seeds I planted only two grew and one was an albino (with white leaves) which died as soon as I moved it into the sun.

Transforming a House Plant

I don't remember when we acquired our first schefflera, but it was almost certainly over a decade ago. Technically it wasn't my plant, though I was always the one tasked with caring for it, and it was never intended to become bonsai. Even now I'm not sure it ever will be, but it's certainly benefited from the bonsai skills I've learnt along the way.

The schefflera spent the first few years of its life living in our entrance hall, a room which gets very little natural light and no sunlight at all. It's a testament to the species that it survived in that environment, but somehow it did. Originally it had three thin trunks with foliage high up, but one day I discovered that it was possible to do a trunk chop on schefflera to encourage branching, so I decided to experiment with one trunk. Sadly my experiment didn't have a happy ending as, in my ignorance, I covered that trunk with plastic and misted it frequently. With the benefit of experience I'm sure that trunk died of root rot. Fortunately the other two survived.

Some time later I decided to try again, but this time I left them uncovered and didn't give them excess water and in due course they started budding again. The only photo I could find from that period was this one, taken in November 2008:

November 2008

Although they were growing back fairly well, the foliage looks rather floppy and weak. Hardly surprising given the fact that they were still in the same dark position that they'd inhabited for several years.

By then I'd joined my bonsai club, and one day it occurred to me that they might benefit from a bit of time outdoors with my other trees. Somewhere along the lines I also moved them to a bigger pot.

In the end that move turned out to be permanent as it was impossible for me to impose darkness on them again once I'd seen how much they benefited from their time outside. Not only did they firm up pretty nicely but they have since produced several branches and even one rather strange aerial root:

Roots - August 2016

The biggest surprise however, was when they produced flowers and berries for the first time two or three years ago. I've never seen that on another potted schefflera before or since.

This is what they look like today, full of flower buds waiting to open:

August 2016

Sometimes I'm tempted to turn them into bonsai, but they have terrible nebari and I'm reluctant to sacrifice the flowers, so my pruning is always restricted to those areas which don't have flower buds. As a result the prospect of them ever becoming bonsai seems unlikely. But, like my indoor vs outdoor experiment with ficuses, this is a clear illustration that even plants which can survive indoors will be a lot happier outside.

Can I grow bonsai indoors?

I've been hanging around Reddit's bonsai group for a while now and, despite my early reservations after receiving some pretty harsh criticism, I'm finding it a really good place to learn.

A topic that comes up for a lot of debate there is whether it's possible to grow bonsai indoors. Some people insist that it can't be done, while others are more open-minded about the idea. What is certain is that some species cannot survive for long indoors and many newbies are in for a shock when they discover that their recently-acquired Juniper bonsai is dead or dying because they were misled into thinking that it could be kept on their desk.

Click here to buy the book 

I confess that when I first became interested in bonsai in around the year 2000, I too wanted to grow my little trees indoors. I knew very little about plants in general back then, but I'd already come across a book about indoor bonsai, so I had no reason to doubt that it could be done. One of my problems was that there weren't too many sunny spots inside my house and I hadn't heard of grow-lamps back then. My early attempts were consigned to the sunniest spot I could find - in the kitchen.

My first two trees were an Azalea and a Ficus, and with the ignorance of a beginner, the first thing I did was plant them in bonsai pots. Neither survived very long. I can't say for sure that it was being indoors that killed the Azalea as I'm sure I must have made other mistakes too. The Ficus, however, certainly could have survived inside if I'd cared for it properly, and I know that its death was entirely due to stupidity on my part.

I was not deterred, but refrained from putting my next batch of trees into bonsai pots and didn't even put much effort into styling them. In fact they spent their early years living with me as house plants. I still have two Ficuses I bought during that period. They now live outside and are slowly being trained into bonsai.

Another early acquisition which survived my early abuse was an Acacia Burkei, a tree which it has always been claimed needs to be outdoors. I've proved that they can survive on a sunny windowsill, but keeping mine there had disastrous consequences, if only because I gave it minimal care. Actually that tree did a lot more than survive, it thrived there... but in so doing the branches grew through the burglar bars covering the windows and when I finally wanted to move the tree, I was forced to cut off all the branches and start over. Had the tree been a Juniper, that would have been a death sentence. My Acacia now lives outdoors too and has developed some decent new branching.

Everything changed when I joined my club in late 2007. That was when I started to realise that even trees which can survive indoors are better off being outside when the weather allows.

Shortly after joining the club I started an experiment to see how keeping a tree indoors affected its growth. I started with these two young Ficus Benjamina cuttings:

Two cuttings at start of experiment

The cutting in the green pot was kept outdoors, while the one in the red pot was kept in my kitchen in rather poor light. After six months the difference is very visible in terms of both size and leaf quality. The leaves look so different that they don't even look like the same species.

Two cuttings at end of experiment - five months later

When the experiment ended I attempted to put some shape into the indoor tree, but in its weakened state the shock of wiring was too much for it and it died. The outdoor tree was with me for several years before I sold it at our club show. To the best of my knowledge it is still alive.