Penetrating epoxy will repair really rotted wood.


When you epoxy (or harden) already rotted wood, without
removing all of the rot, you are asking for more rot. None
of these -- epoxy or wood hardener -- soaks into _all_ of
the rotted area. Any rot left behind deep in the tree will
grow. It's also somewhat questionable whether these things
actually kill the rot fungi.

Treatment by either of these should be attempted only after
you have scraped and cut away to bare, hard wood and then a
little more, if possible. Even then, since the fungal
spores that cause the rot are _so_ small, you likely will
leave some behind. (Perhaps a bath in some kind of fungicide
before the hardening treatment would help, but . . .)

Of course, the rot itself won't kill a tree. The decay
fungi and bacteria don't attack living wood, just the
interior deadwood -- which the tree is always making, so
there's an endless and growing supply. In nature, death
comes because the rot has taken away so much of the hard
tissue that holds a tree upright that it becomes top heavy
and snaps off (usually onto someone's roof, it seems).

In bonsai, a bad case of rot simply has to be designed into
the tree. Fillers and other things used to restore the
original outline again adhere to the wood uncertainly, and
the inevitable spaces become the sites of future, eventual
rotting. It's usually better to cut it all away and then
see what you can make of what you have left.

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - Nature
encourages no looseness, pardons no errors. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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