When I saw the world's largest tree named General Sherman Tree, in the Sequoia National Park in California, I thought to myself that it looked like at least two trees fused together.
Several other gigantic trees in that park were fused multiple trunks.
That reminded me of the potted ficus trees at home with fused trunks. And ironically, looking at that gigantic tree gave me the idea to try a ficus fusion
bonsai! (Later I googled it and found that I wasn't the first one to think of that, of course!)
Since I have a regular supply of ficus benjamina cuttings from the several house plants we have, it wasn't too hard to get started. I started several cuttings in the
Summer of 2018. Two were straight and woody with very few branches - these I thought will just provide the bulk for the trunk. Others were thin and more ramified.
In all I probably had 6 or 7 cuttings. In
mid September 2018, after all of them had rooted sufficiently, I bundled together with twist ties and string and planted them in a mix of mostly potting soil , along with some some lava rock, fine gravel and Napa oil dry thrown in (notice the classy yogurt container pot ;)
I know some folks do more elaborate stuff like using some special paper/cloth to wrap the trunks. I don't know if that's necessary. Time will tell...
Fast forward to
May 2019, and... well, not much to get excited about. Still no sign of any fusion, though the cuttings are doing great. As part of the ficus trouble shooting experiments, I repotted this and got rid of all the lava rock, since that was one of my suspects (it likely was spider mites, as I detail in this
post).
So the wait continues... the plants spend all the time outdoors now that the weather is great.
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