Billy M. Rhodes wrote:

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.

Well, that seems not to be true, either. Jerry Meislik has pictures of
partially defoliated trees in his book about ficus - some branches with
leaves, others completely defoliated. He specifically says that that
kind of partial defoliation is a valid training technique.

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.

Sounds reasonable. A little experience is worth a lot of theory.

Pastorio

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