I started experimenting with some schleffera cuttings as we had a large one growing wild out the front of our place. The photos that follow aren't a true progression, just a collection of schleffera projects I have at various stages to provide an idea of what I've been up to and see if it's useful for other impatient banyan fanciers that want to have a lash.... I have continued to take cuttings as I've trimmed back the couple I have in development. In Sydney's humidity it seems to be a matter of dropping the cutting into some potting mix and they are away. Pretty low casualty rates even without rooting hormone, just basic aftercare in keeping them out of direct sunlight until they have struck some roots and start budding again. I let them run long and straight without worrying about branching. Next step is to bundle a couple of the cutting groups together in a larger growing on pot. You can see i"ve got some grafting tape on to try and fuse them, well they will fuse (SLOWLY), but nowhere near as well as figs in my experience. I tie them together firmly at the height I want the branching to start and then gradually start bending those long single leader sticks down - ultimately back to the edge of the pot in what is an upsdie down "U". This seems to do a few things:
- it creates a lot of budding up higher so that new branches can form and have some nice direction changes as opposed to keeping the straight leaders as primaries. They are pretty apically dominant so a lot of the action happens up high with new branches.
- with branches bent down to the pot you create a low canopy with a lot of shade and humidity for aerial roots to start forming off the main fused trunk.
- in a lot of cases if you bury the bent down growing tip in the pot it can take root and give you a cheats aerial root! Although they take a while to change the sap flow direction and actually behave like roots. If you keep bending any new long branches down and lop off anything that you don't want (best to use cut paste or Vaseline as they will generally die back to the next node) the growth can stay pretty healthy and you can get plenty of aerial roots starting to form. I tend to drag them out wide around the base to try and get more taper. A little inelegant I have to admit, but it was about getting results quickly! This is a close up of some of the aerial roots that have formed around the original trunks in the background. Toward the very back you can see some foliage at the rim of the pot. These are bent over branches from the canopy with a couple of the grow tips buried in the growing medium at the back on the chance they will root. If not I'll just cut them back to the branch I want higher up. This is the first tree I started the process on about 5 years ago. I wasted a year with it wrapped in a plastic bag to try and encourage aerial roots from the outer branches - lesson was letting the branches run long and straight and bending them down to the pot works better. This tree needs plenty of work to make the canopy look credible and I could do with some "outrigger" aerial roots to make it look a little less top-heavy. You can see that I've grafted in a new cutting to the right as a test, plus I've seeing if I can get an aerial root to extend down inside that bit of black ag pipe next to it. I'm planning to let some branches extend again and bend them down as on the one above.
I've started doing something similar with some PJ Figs and a Benji also - progressing OK a year or two in. Pretty sure I'm not going to create any show quality specimens - not even sure it qualifies as bonsai, but it is a bit of fun and hopefully provides a few ideas for those of us with itchy bonsai fingers and a hankering for banyans.
