The Resurrection
... A Benjamina Fig History:
The "Approach Graft" Story
by Dierk Neugebauer
In last month's issue I shared with you the sad story of a beautiful benjamina tree that, despite my best efforts, declined over the years, so that I felt it appropriate to take drastic, desperate measures. I ended that issue with the application of the "trunk chop" method, popularized in our club by the renowned Reiner Goebel.
We left the November issue with the magnificent "mother & son" benjaminas having been reduced to two stumps about fourteen inches in height. My hope and expectation was that both trunks would blossom with new buds, turning into new branches, and two new trees.
The reality was not quite as expected! Perhaps the season for such actions was not quite right.
In chopping the trees, I paid close attention to where I thought latent buds would be hiding, and made my cuts in such a way that buds would develop where I wanted a new apex and major branches.
Not quite the case! Instead of buds being produced where I wanted them, they appeared "anywhere but...". Was it that the season was not quite right for such measures? What season you ask? I'm not quite sure any more ... but... record keeping could be such an assett!!!
The taller of the two trees developed nothing that would work as an apex. The top didn't bud out. Instead, budding did occur further down the trunk where I hoped to create a good primary branch. The smaller of the two trunks decided to bud "on the inside;" that is, it developed a bud between the two trunks, instead of on the outside.
It was indeed a mess! Auntie Rosie would be horrified ... rest her soul.
Two years ago there seemed to be a fair bit of interest in grafting branches where you needed them, onto unruly trees that refused to co-operate naturally. As a matter of fact, it was within the last year that Norman Haddrick delivered a presentation to the membership on just this topic. Unfortunately I couldn't be there for it. But then, for me, it was already too late anyway. ...
I had heard a good deal of talk about what's known as "approach grafting!" This is how it works. You could work with two trees growing in close proximity to each other, or with one tree that had ungainly long branches that had little foliage close to the trunk.
The idea is that you make a branch from the other tree attach itself where you want it to grow on the tree you're interested in correcting. Or ... the same is true when dealing with the unruly long branches of a tree. To shorten them you might bend them backwards upon themselves in the direction of the trunk and then away again, thus forming a loop, where the end of the branch is now much closer to the trunk than it originally was - and you join them.
The "challenge" is to make them grow together so that they become one. There are only two tough spots here: getting them to join in the right spot, and waiting long enough for the "joint" to be secure and permanent.
Approach grafting from one tree to the other was the approach I decided upon with Aunt Rosie's benjamina. Since the smaller trunk's branch was totally ill placed for it, and since the main trunk had nothing growing where I wanted it to grow, I decided to make the branch from the small tree into the new apex of the larger tree, using the approach graft method.
In doing an approach graft, the first trick is to strip away just enough of the bark down to the cambium layer on both the branch to be joined, and the trunk to which it would be joined. If these layers don't meet, the graft will not work! You try to shape the cuts as you make them to get as much appropriate contact as possible.
I set to work cutting away just enough bark to allow the cambium layers to meet, and then I sealed the "joint" with grafting wax and tape. Next I tried to forget about the whole thing for a good long time in order to give nature a chance to join the two.
How long to wait? The advice I've heard more than once, is "at least a year" and then, if you can stand it, "another year." In other words, the longer the better!
I did manage to wait for two years, only because I had enough other "stuff" to keep me happily occupied. I knew that the time had come when I noticed that the approach graft branch had increased its girth "past" the graft. In other words, the branch was thinner where it came off the smaller tree than it was beyond the point of the graft. Furthermore, the trunk on the main tree had died back all the way down to the point of the graft itself, since it had developed no shoots higher up on the trunk.
At the graft point the tree's bark was obviously alive! Above this, it was dead; you could peel it away from the trunk.
Now what? I had so hoped to be able to use both the mother/daughter or father/son(?) tree configuration. ... But after consultation with Bob Wilcox early this spring, the decision was made that the "offspring" had to be sacrificed. Period.
And so it was. Period.
The pictures accompanying this article show some of the changes that this tree underwent.
PS
Having written these articles on the benjamina fig tree, I certainly wished that I had taken more pictures, earlier on, just in case, ... than I actually did. More pictures would make it so much easier for you to see what happened, and for me to tell about it.
Not only must we be artists and horticulturalists, record keepers and photographers, but we must also have a good set of memory cells functioning on our tree's behalf so that when we want to write that article for the Journal, ...we can.
Having said all of that, I wish to remind those of you with internet access, that you look at the following pictures "in colour" on the internet in order to appreciate the tree a little more.
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