So I had one of my first lessons in maintaining large bonsai and reducing leaf size with a teacher of mine a couple of months ago.

This one of his (many, many) large fig trees. I had the honour of trimming it during this lesson. He also explained to me why we trim it and how we are supposed to trim them properly.

After about 2-3 hours the tree was done, I had trimmed the branchlets back to 2 leaves under instruction, the reason being that the first two leaves are the smallest on the branch. With figs every leaf past the first two will be large and are therefore not wanted in bonsai.

Another thing to note is that this was done in SUMMER, pruning a ficus in winter or a colder more dormant season can hinder your tree’s growth. Ficus thrive in summer weather, hot tropical weather. Here (in Sydney) Summer is the perfect time for everything ficus, repotting, defoliating, and pruning.

Here is the finished tree, I will possibly update it again if this thread is interesting to those of you who are interested enough to read when it regains it’s foliage and ramifies a lot more.