In a message dated 4/7/2005 2:33:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
writes:

I've heard this forever about F. ben and I don't know why it's the
conventional wisdom. I have 8 of them and I defoliate each of them
completely every other year. I remove every single leaf, and prune and
wire branches in June.

One wisdom spread around here is that if you remove every single leaf
from the entire tree at one time it will come back but if you defoliate an
entire branch on one part of the tree and leave others, that branch is die back.
I have a F. ben. "Exotica" that I remove about 1/3 of the largest leaves every
two weeks, this seems to work for me.
Billy on the Florida Space Coast

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