This is a ficus microcarpa that started life as a mallsai. It was given to my daughter and her husband on the occasion of their marriage in October, 2007 by a well-meaning but bonsai illiterate relative to represent the "family tree". My son-in-law immediately looked at me and said, "You're taking care of it for us. We'll kill it."
The first order of business was to remove the glued-on rocks and repot it. (It came in an off-white plastic pot.) As it happened, shortly after the wedding I was at Nature's Way Nursery in Harrisburg, PA for an event, and found the round pot shown in the photo for sale by one of the vendors (Nitju Clayworks). So I bought that and repotted the tree into it.
I didn't work on it through the winter. It took awhile to figure out how to approach the styling. The key problem was that the trunk had been chopped off horizontally, and there were two branches growing straight up from either side just below the chop. I'm not sure how they produce this sort of tree. It may be that the branches were grafted on. In any case, it was pretty ugly.
When spring arrived, I did some wiring and pruning to begin giving some shape to the tree. Today I unwired it, removed a couple of branches that had died, and made a "V" cut between the two main branches in an effort to get rid of the ugly trunk chop. I then rewired most (but not all) of the tree. I did only minimal pruning right now. Some growth that clearly needs to be removed was left on to help promote healing (I hope) in the center.
This is nowhere near "finished", and it may never be more than an average tree. However, I'm determined to make it look better than it did when I "found" it.
4-Jul-2008
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