Updated this post on Sept 1 2018

I bought this mallsai ficus about a year ago. At that time I only had 1 or 2 other trees and for some reason I wanted a ficus. Now a year later I can say I’m not that big of a tropical bonsai fan. Mostly because they have to stay indoors for a big part of the year.

This particular ficus consisted of a Ficus Retusa rootstock with another variety grafted on top of it. I don’t know what variety it is to be honest. The thing is that shoots started to emerge from the rootstock a couple of months after I bought the tree so now it has 2 types of foliage. Also the roots as they are now aren’t really that suited for bonsai. At first I wanted to give away the plant but in the end I decided I should keep it to try some basic techniques on. If it doesn’t work I lost a €15 tree which shouldn’t send me into bankruptcy.

So I decided to try something out:

The tree as it looked at the beginning of my project.

2 different kinds of foliage. On the left the oval grafted foliage. On the right the pointy Ficus Retusa foliage from the rootstock.

I cut off the grafted part and decided to use the biggest branch as a cutting.

The original rootstock with the new shoots pruned back a bit.

With a saw I cut off the upper part of the rootstock just where the roots started to split.

I put the stump that I cut off in a mixture of akadama and pumice and covered that mix with sphagnum moss.

Here’s what I ended up with…

So instead of 1 tree that I was giving away I now ended up with 2 potential trees. Maybe this project will succeed, maybe it won’t. We’ll see in a couple of weeks/months.

Sept 1 2018 update:

Today I dug away some soil around the Ficus Retusa stump. Where I cut the tree roots are starting to grow. Succes!

I’m going to let the tree alone for the rest of the year and next spring I’ll do some rootwork and repotting.