Caught-Napping:
Here is a website with several demonstrations of the technique you are
asking about:
http://www.dugzbonsai.com/tridenttrunk.htm

Instead of just bundling the trunks together, this guy wraps the trunks
around a "frame." I have seen pictures at other websites where people
have done this with various ficus species. In my opinion the results
can be excellent. I picked up a Ficus benjamina just like yours at a
grocery store to play around with this technique. Too early to give any
results but a couple of observations: 1) Grocery stores and Home
Depot are not the best place to buy trees, however, if you want some
cheap material to experiment with you can get several F. benjamina for
$10 or so. F. benjamina is not ideal for bonsai, however, F. benjamina
is hard to kill, and a good plant for a beginner to learn with. I have
bought several from grocery stores and have never had one die. 2) As
far as the trunk fusing technique, someone pointed out on another
thread that F. benjamina doesn't backbud, so you probably need to
keep at least a couple of live branches on each individual trunk for
quite a while. I think you can get around being stuck with branches in
the wrong places by wrapping the trunks around an inner frame in a
spiral fashion, so each individual trunk can have branches to the side
or back. 3) Although F. benjamina doesn't backbud much, it is very
easy to do thread grafts with ficus, so you can easily put a branch
anywhere you want. (See Colin Lewis' website for a nice article on
thread grafting:
http://www.btinternet.com/~colinlewi...g/Thread.html.)
Since ficus are also very easy to propagate from cuttings, you can use
rooted cuttings for your thread grafts, rather than twisting a branch
around from the same tree. 4) I assume your ficus is a Ficus
benjamina. I encourage you to experiment (and share your results) but
as others have pointed out, there are other ficus species probably
better suited to bonsai, so you might think about trying this technique
with other ficus species. A cheap way to accumulate a large number
of small trees to fuse is to buy one tree and root all the cuttings. It will
take a while for the cuttings to get big enough to use, but in the
meantime you have your grocery store tree to experiment with.
Good Luck,
John Carnes

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