Hey, Billy Rae! Go for it! You have nothing to fear! My only advice, up front, is this: Don't buy a braided group of plants. In my opinion, the braided plants are doomed to failure. Now, onto the story of how I came by my Pachira: My brother has a Pachira that used to be braided...slowly, all but one of the trunks died. The remaining trunk had been the largest/healthiest from the start, which is why I always suggest that a buyer simply purchase a full, healthy, single-trunked specimen. Anyhow, my brother is rough on plants. During one of his "moods," he broke several leaves off his Pachira...I can't remember if he bit them off, or if he was swinging his glow-sticks around the room like weapons. Long story short, he placed one of those leaves in the bottom of a plastic cup, filled with generic peat-based potting soil. The soil was constantly moist/wet because there were no drainage holes in the cup. He handed me the cup, and said here, take it. So I did. I brought the leaf from Sacramento to Auburn, where it sat from February to May on a warm Eastern window-sill. Surprisingly, it grew into a full-sized plant! Now, I summer my Pachira on the front deck (western exposure), beneath a large maple tree. One year, I put my Pachira out before the maple had leafed-out...big mistake! Nearly every Pachira leaf was sunburned white. New leaves grew when the dead leaves dropped, but now I know to wait until I can offer filtered sunlight. After a period of acclimation, Pachira can handle quite a bit of sun. Josh

Sounds like something killed or cut the root; maybe a cutworm? Do you have a dog? Dog urine, and cat urine to a lesser degree are very concentrated; and can seriously damage a young tree. Salt? as in water softener? Hard to tell from afar, especially without fotos. Could simply be SIDS... Sudden infant death syndrome, with no explanation. At any rate, I would un-pot it and have a look at the root; if the root is good, you can always put it back and pray for reincarnation.

I can't speak specifically to the issue of a fig tap root, but I got a potted Julie mango from a friend in 1/2 of a rotting oak barrel and when the owner moved it, the tap root broke off also. I put it in the ground immediately and It wilted for a while and sprang back with a bit of extra water. Now it's healthy, but I have to water it more frequently than my other mango trees as it will show wilting stress while my others will not when its dry for a long time. From what I know the taproot serves two purposes, getting deeper water, and resistance to wind. If your fig recovers hopefully it's in a spot that's protected from wind. You may also have to water it more than in the past? My best advice is to not let it die of thirst. Again this has been my experience with a mango and a few ornamental plants, and experts may have a different take on it.

Unless the parent tree was own root the sucker yours came from is the sweet cherry rootstock and not the named cultivar that was presumably grafted onto it. Either the rootstock seedling happens to be a yellow cherry as well or the whole parent tree, including the roots was the yellow cultivar. Sweet cherry is actually a weed species in this region and suckers to form groves on local wooded hillsides, where it even overtakes and overtops the native red alder trees often present in quantity on the same sites. It also crosses with the much less exuberant, native bitter cherry to produce a nearly fruitless, intermediate hybrid called Puget cherry. Some ~tall examples of the latter are conspicuous when in bloom, on undeveloped land between I-5 and Lakeside School (near Seattle). It is usual to have problems with suckering and bony surface roots with plantings of sweet cherries - perhaps all the more so when these are present as rootstocks for Japanese flowering cherries. All you can do is uncover the bases of the suckers and saw them away. If there are horizontal runners that lead back to the original planting follow these back to the parent tree and saw them off at their points of origin, pull the rest up. You don't, of course want to saw off normal roots of the parent tree - just the ones that are suckering runners like aspen trees and running species of bamboos produce. This post was edited by bboy on Sat, Mar 15, 14 at 17:05