AusBonsai

hi just bought a fukien tea of ebay and i was wondering if they have any special requirements i should know about, all i've found on the internet is that there a bit temperamental. also if anyone has one id love to see a pic of it for some inspiration and any advice would be appreciated. the tree is about 18cm tall.

Hi
Although I don't own one of these trees I do remember reading about it in my Bonsai Encyclopedia.
It says that you can easily trim into any style,constant trimmingto two or three leaves once six to eight leaves have formed. You can wire woody branches at any time and repot every second year in early spring.
Keep soil moist at all times and water sparingly in winter. This tree prefers to grow in full sun and in slight shade in hot summers.
Hope this helps.
Fiona

Fukien tea (Carmona microphylla) is a very good subject for bonsai in tropical and subtropical areas. I don't think they are temperamental provided you give them the right conditions. I grow the similar native Carmona retusa so my comments are for that too. They do not like to dry out and benefit from regular application of fertilizer. They easily use up nutrients and become nutrient impoverished so keep therfertilizer up to them. If you live in a hot tropical area they seem to benefit from slight shading. Under 30% shadescreen is good, or only full sun for part of the day. In a cool area I don't know. They produce a lot of flowers and a lot of fruit. I recommend removing the spent flowers so that they do not form fruit which is an energy and nutrient loss to the tree. They grow better in slightly larger pots, especially deeper pots. Plants grown in small or shallow bonsai pots seem to dry out and become yellow and loose their vigour. Fukien tea attract ants and mealy bug. They drop their leaves if you spray them with pest oil. I spray them with pyrethrum and keep then in the shade for the day and then wash it all off. I add a bit of wetting agent when I do it- maybe a mild detergent would help.

The plant I grow comes from Cape York and has coarser larger leaves. It was grown from seed and is still small. Many growers here grow the exotic type quite successfully. It has smaller less hairy leaves and self pollinates.

You can snip out any wayward growth to a lateral pointing leaf. Trim the shoots on the top part but let those low down grow long for now to feed the trunk. Defoliation will exhaust the tree and prunning to bare wood will probably also exhaust it. In time I would plant it into a bigger pot

Ash

thanks for the advice ill keep it in mind as it grows

Hi De,

I have several of these - because every damn cutting I put in a pot grows. The things are like weeds at my place. They just grow. Get a bit leggy if you don't keep them trimmed. They grow indoors, outdoors, where ever. I don't give them any special treatment except to give the cuttings away every opportunity I have. I currently have about 20 cuttings to get rid of, and one cutting I will keep plus the parent plant.

They flower like mad and produce heaps of red berries that drop onto the soil and sprout there too. I pull those out.

Hope that helps.

Glenda

Hi there De_Kezer, the reason why I got into Bonsai many years ago was because of a picture I saw in a book called the "Bonsai Encyclopedia" by Harry Tomlinson and published by Dorling Kindersley. The picture was of a Fukien Tea Tree. It was at that very moment that I was hooked !!!! First of all, let me say that I love Fukien Tea (A native shrub of China and the Phillipines), because of the exact shade of green on the leaves. It is the best , most striking green I have ever seen in a plant which is further enhanced by the glossiness of the leaves. On mature specimens, believe it or not, the bark will go a greeny / pink colour. The flowers are little angelic white beauties that then turn to red and green berries. Having all of these happening at once means the Fukien Tea as a bonsai can hold it's own with any species !!! There are two types: Large leaved Fukien Tea (Carmona Macrophylla) and Smalled Leaved Fukien Tea (Ehretia Buxifolia). The Smalled Leaved version will readily give you berries after flowering but the larger one will not unless there is something around to pollinate the flowers such as lady beetles. The small leaved version will take forever to thicken (in terms of trunk size) and generally speaking if you want to eventually own a grand looking tree, the best option is Carmona.

OK, down to the business end. The best way to water a fukien tea is to soak it and then let it go bone dry, then water again. If you over water, the Fukien Tea will tell you pretty quickly as it's leaves start to go yellow. They LOVE humidity and they absolutely LOVE heat. A fukien tea would not have a problem even if the temperature were at 50 degrees Celcius, in fact it would love it. I use dynamic liffter and always keep it in full sun all the time. Anyone who says they need some shade does not know what they are talking about. I recently started work in a nursery and took both my Fukien Teas up there with me as the heat can be stifling.(Perfect for these guys!!)

Well, I can tell you, in 6 years I have never seen them so happy and healthy and they are going ballistic!! Ok , so here's the bad news...............Wooly aphids LOVE Fukien Tea trees, so much so that, if you had 20 trees of different types next to your Fukien Tea tree, they would just about ignore all the others if they know a Fukien Tea tree is around. This means that a regular spray of Confidor is probably a good idea as a preventative measure. Because the foliage can get extremely thick and compact, they take pleasure in hiding themselves very well and you may have to pick them out with a sharp nail like apparatus. They tend to embed themselves in the leaf axils and are therefore very hard to get to.. To cut a long story short, if you come out to inspect your Fukien Tea Tree one day and you see ants crawling busily up and down the trunk...you have a problem. Fukien Tea Trees are pest magnets!!! So much so that I would keep some distance between them and any other bonsai I might have especially over spring. I live in bondi and I have had them growing (albeit more slowly) over winter as well. Constantly thinning out the foliage will not reduce the possibility of an infestation but it WILL allow you to more easily detect if there is a potential pest problem.

In spring and summer, if you wanted to, you could completely defoliate them but I don't really see the point as the leaves are relatively small as it is but it may, if anything, give the shrub an renewed sense of vigour and there is definetely no harm in doing it every now and then. The leaves typically come back much brighter in colour.


Hope this all helps


Feel free to PM me if you have any questions although an email to jpoulos@ozemail.com.au would be better as my internet connection is painfully slow!!


Regards

John

thanks glenda its nice to know if i want more its easy to get them. thanks for the info jester i have the same book and the picture of the fukien tea is one of the reasons i started in bonsai to, i dont know why i liked it i just do. im a little unhappy that there pest magnets but you have to take the good with the bad. thanks for the info on what to spray it with as i have read they are sensitive to pesticides. if i have any problems ill definitely send you a message thanks.