I wrote this as a reply to something over on the botany forum and figured I'd be able to use it from time to time, so saved it. Let me know if you want anything explained a different way: A higher degree of expression of the pigment anthocyanin (which expresses the color red or purple) in juvenile foliage is very common throughout the plant kingdom for a couple of reasons. First, even though the pigment absorbs light w/o being a part of the photosynthetic process, it plays a photoprotective role for new leaves that emerge under high light conditions ...... when they are in an ontogenetic stage that make them more sensitive/vulnerable to light over-saturation. If you were able to quantify it at home ..... the reduction in anthocyanin's expression would be seen to correspond with a decreased need for photoprotection, this, because photosynthetic maturation allows leaves to utilize higher light intensities. A major consideration (that occurs during photosynthetic maturation) is an increase in chlorophyll, the pigment often referred to as 'nature's sunscreen for plants'. In short, the red coloration disappears as photopigment concentrations and leaf cuticle thickness increases, both of which would be occurring as mesophyll underlying the leaf cuticle differentiates into separate layers (pallisade and spongy). Second (but probably not a consideration in F benjamina), the red coloration is also very often associated with an increase in phenolic compounds that serve as defense against insect predation or herbivory by making leaves unpalatable. It's also thought in many circles that the red coloration may make leaves more difficult for some insects and herbivores to see, and may signal insects that the affected leaves are a less nutritional food source than bright green foliage elsewhere, or that it would make a poor receptacle for ovaposition (egg-laying). Al

The plant isn't getting near the light it needs to stay fit. In a very high % of plants, a reduction in photo load (light levels or duration of exposure) stimulates chemical messengers to inform plant central which leaves are not pulling their weight (they are using more energy than they are producing). The plant then starts the shedding process, which initially includes harvesting mobile nutrients and other bio compounds from leaf tissues. Since magnesium (Mg) is mobile, the plant salvages it and recycles it from leaves destined to be shed. Mg is an important part of the green pigment chlorophyll because it's at the center of every molecule, so when Mg is salvaged, chlorophyll molecules are destroyed. With the primary pigment no longer expressing, other pigments that are present but masked by chlorophyll become visible. That's what you're seeing in the leaves. The necrotic areas on the leaf margins are almost certainly the result of over-watering, or a soil that's too water-retentive for how you currently water. That needs to be addressed, or you need to be resigned to the fact that a very significant measure of the plants potential will be lost as it spends energy regenerating roots killed by the prolonged periods of soil saturation. I suggest you start using a 'tell' to 'tell' you when it's time to water. Your digital device (finger) works poorly as a guide in pots deeper than a few inches. More on using a tell at the bottom of my offering. Background/more details: - I am using Formula 420 soil (recommended by the nursery). Many media that are recommended by the seller are no where near what the plant needs to maintain a healthy root system. It's good to keep in m ind that a healthy plant is only a dream if you can't keep the root system happy. A picture of it on a piece of white paper would offer a clue about where the soil belongs comparatively (poor, fair, middling, good, better, ..... - Plants are potted in a glazed terracotta pot with a single large drainage hole in the bottom. Did you move it to that pot when you bought it, or soon after? If so, it might be over-potted. - The bottom 1-2 inches of the pot are rocks/pebbles (I don't know where this came from or why I did it) Not helpful as a drainage layer, but there are ways to use large items big rocks, bricks, soda bottles, over-turned pots, ...... as ballast - with very good results. - When potting the plant from its original container, it was nearly impossible for me to loosen the roots up much at all - the whole potted area (soil/roots) was very dense and I was afraid to break it up too much in case I destroyed the roots (not large thick roots, very fine thing roots spidering EVERYWHERE). If you live in the US and not in the deep south, Somewhere around Father's Day is the best time to repot. Plants that live indoors are generally at their weakest from mid-winter through early spring, so repotting during that period, except for emergencies, is best avoided until the timing better favors a fast recovery - June. - Deep watering is taking place once a week - or when the top 3-4 inches is dry - and the excess water in the drip pan is removed (somewhat) promptly - this is *not* a scientific method whatsoever, I'm getting a dowel to insert into the soil in about 30 mins. OK - good! I covered that a bit above, and already added the info about using a tell below, so I'll just leave it in case others passing through have interest. Try to make sure there is no pathway by which the effluent can make its way back into the pot once it's exited through the drain hole. The pot should never sit in the effluent. I raise all of my pots so the bottom of the pot is ALWAYS above the maximum level the effluent can reach. Example: - Once a week (or depending on dust) I wipe each leaf down with a damp towel. That's fine if you're using just water. Avoid using any household cleaning supplies, and rinse residual soap or fabric softener from the cloth before you use it. - I used to mist the leaves the first couple weeks once every day or so - but I can't believe this is effective AT ALL and stopped this practice. Good - you were right. - Overall growth on each of the plants has stopped - in fact, the plant showing issues has been the fastest grower of the 3. As mentioned earlier, I used to get about 1 new leaf per plant every week until the last week. Each plant has a visible meristem, the two on the non-affected plants are very short and haven't grown in days, the one on the affected plant has been about to open for the last few days but hasn't. Plants that aren't growing are dying. I didn't coin that sentence, a guy with a PhD did in one of his books about plant production in containers. His name is Carl Whitcomb. He reasons plants that make more food/energy than it takes to keep their systems orderly create new cells with the bounty - IOW, they grow. Plants that use more energy than they are making, don't grow. In fact, as shedding organisms, they start shedding biomass, starting with leaves, then branches. Since using more energy than the plant can create is an unsustainable arrangement, if a plant is not growing, it will die unless the trend is reversed. You reverse the trend by correcting conditions that require the plant to live at, near, or beyond the limits it's genetically programmed to tolerate. That's your ONLY job as a grower - to figure out what's wrong and fix it. Learn to do that and you can grow almost anything in a pot. - On the lower part of 2 of the plants, where the leaves attach to the trunk/stem, seems to be drooping - I'm unsure if this is a symptom or the leaves are just somewhat heavy. You described what happens when plants lose turgidity (internal water pressure) - they wilt. The wilting occurs from over-watering because root function is suppressed by a lack of oxygen in the medium when the soil's pores are full of water. That's also why you're seeing necrotic lesions on leaf margins. Over-watering affects water uptake and prevents the plant fro9m effectively moving water to its most distal tissues - leaf tips/margins. - There has been zero fertilization; brand new soil and only a month of time in my home seemed a little soon for the need to fertilize (to me, the dummy). You should probably be thinking about fertilizing. It's imperative if you want healthy plants in pots. I use Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 on ALL my trees (275 - 300 of them, not counting cuttings. If you're interested, ask somewhere down the line. It's monkey easy if your soil allows you to water correctly, and very difficult to do effectively if you are forced to suffer under the influence of a water-retentive medium. Basically - I believe I've been overwatering this buddy of mine - BUT, I'd be devastated if I corrected the watering but still had the same issues. Does this look like classic - and ONLY - overwatering, or is there anything else I should attempt to correct/rule out? Growing well is a holistic discipline. You must provide everything the plant needs, and not too much of it if the plant is to prosper. This is surprisingly easy to do, once you understand how to recognize of make a soil that you won't have to war with for control of your plant's vitality (health). Everything is in play. Light, temperature, fertility, soil structure, (soil) moisture control, others. It's likely that too much water in the soil is currently limiting the plant; but, correcting that just makes something else the most limiting. Like driving to a distant destination. You're lost, low on gas, and have a leaky tire. Getting unlost and back on track makes being low on gas or the leaky tire the threat most likely to keep you from your destination. Plants work exactly like that. Fix the over-watering and light is probably the factor that's limiting. Fix the light issue, and temperature or nutrition, or soil pH will be next on the list of most limiting. We're always trying to fix what causes stress, and there's always something causing it. Fortunately, you can quite easily reach the level where you're entirely happy with your plants health and appearance, but that requires avoiding a helter skelter approach and sticking to a reasoned plan you can replicate at will. You'll also find that plants are very similar in what they like. They are for more different in what they won't/can't tolerate. IOW, a very high % of plants, with the right medium, can all be treated the same and thrive for it. Al Using a 'tell' Over-watering saps vitality and is one of the most common plant assassins, so learning to avoid it is worth the small effort. Plants make and store their own energy source – photosynthate - (sugar/glucose). Functioning roots need energy to drive their metabolic processes, and in order to get it, they use oxygen to burn (oxidize) their food. From this, we can see that terrestrial plants need air (oxygen) in the soil to drive root function. Many off-the-shelf soils hold too much water and not enough air to support good root health, which is a prerequisite to a healthy plant. Watering in small sips leads to a build-up of dissolved solids (salts) in the soil, which limits a plant's ability to absorb water – so watering in sips simply moves us to the other horn of a dilemma. It creates another problem that requires resolution. Better, would be to simply adopt a soil that drains well enough to allow watering to beyond the saturation point, so we're flushing the soil of accumulating dissolved solids whenever we water; this, w/o the plant being forced to pay a tax in the form of reduced vitality, due to prolong periods of soil saturation. Sometimes, though, that's not a course we can immediately steer, which makes controlling how often we water a very important factor. In many cases, we can judge whether or not a planting needs watering by hefting the pot. This is especially true if the pot is made from light material, like plastic, but doesn't work (as) well when the pot is made from heavier material, like clay, or when the size/weight of the pot precludes grabbing it with one hand to judge its weight and gauge the need for water. Fingers stuck an inch or two into the soil work ok for shallow pots, but not for deep pots. Deep pots might have 3 or more inches of soil that feels totally dry, while the lower several inches of the soil is 100% saturated. Obviously, the lack of oxygen in the root zone situation can wreak havoc with root health and cause the loss of a very notable measure of your plant's potential. Inexpensive watering meters don't even measure moisture levels, they measure electrical conductivity. Clean the tip and insert it into a cup of distilled water and witness the fact it reads 'DRY'. One of the most reliable methods of checking a planting's need for water is using a 'tell'. You can use a bamboo skewer in a pinch, but a wooden dowel rod of about 5/16” (75-85mm) would work better. They usually come 48” (120cm) long and can usually be cut in half and serve as a pair. Sharpen all 4 ends in a pencil sharpener and slightly blunt the tip so it's about the diameter of the head on a straight pin. Push the wooden tell deep into the soil. Don't worry, it won't harm the root system. If the plant is quite root-bound, you might need to try several places until you find one where you can push it all the way to the pot's bottom. Leave it a few seconds, then withdraw it and inspect the tip for moisture. For most plantings, withhold water until the tell comes out dry or nearly so. If you see signs of wilting, adjust the interval between waterings so drought stress isn't a recurring issue.

Mike - pinch the top branches, let the lower ones grow. When to repot and when the plant needs a repot can vary by more than 6 months. E.g., if I had a F elastica with roots congested to the degree it needs repotting now, I wouldn't repot now. I might consider potting up to a slightly larger pot now if the root congestion was really really bad, but probably wouldn't even do that. While no plant likes being root bound, Ficus tolerates it reasonably well, so waiting until the summer after you discover your tree could do with a repot wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to it. If for some reason you don't want to wait to repot, potting up can be done almost any time, but I'd still wait to pot up until summer. If you pot up in the months when the tree is just sitting there with a blank look on its face, you'll have a lot of soil that will only be very slowly colonized by roots, which increases the potential for root issues related to an over-potted plant. It's just not worth it from my perspective, and I think I've done more than 500 repots of Ficus covering somewhere between 12-20 species. Also, I don't buy into the idea a plant needs to acclimate to its surroundings before you make changes. If I buy a temperate plant in the spring while it's dormant, I repot right away, before the buds break. If I buy it in summer or fall, I wait until the most appropriate time to repot, which is almost always spring. Tropical trees and houseplants get repotted (usually) in June, when they are most robust - no matter if I bought them in June or the December previous. I used to plant about 30 large mixed containers to place throughout the gardens and decks, all from scratch. My habit would be to bring the plants home, leave them in the shade for a few days, then move the sun lovers to sun for a few days, then combine them in combinations I thought might look good, after ripping the bottom 1/2-3/4 of the root mass off every plant. Plants so treated actually establish faster than plants combined w/o having their roots disturbed. Stress only occurs when the plant is asked to tolerate conditions at or beyond the limits it's genetically programmed to tolerate; and, if the grower is proficient it will be short lived. Also, there is a night/day difference between spring and early spring in a large part of the world. In the deep south (of the US), it might not matter much if you repot Ficus (houseplants) in March, but early spring repots are better avoided in the rest of the US because houseplants energy reserves are generally at the lowest point in the growth cycle in early spring after a long and dark (low light) winter. The tree will recover far faster if your repotting and hard pruning are done in mid to late June. Father's Day is a good reference point and easy to remember. Al

all plants can be propagated .... and almost all houseplant NEED to be ... just to keep them from taking over the house ... a cutting.. IS THE SAME PLANT... so if you can root a few ... you can get rid of the old huge one.. and perhaps have extra to give to friends or family .. and if hubby cant deal with it.. duct tape it to his bare chest.. and shove him and it out the door ... and good riddance to both ... lol .. and the key argument is.. a rooted piece is EXACTLY the same plant ... you can have it for decades .. without losing half your floor space ... sooo.. after watching the vids.. start a few ... and in a month or two... when you sure those are rooted ... move the old one outside for summer.. full bright shade ... and then .... in late fall.. just forget to bring it in ... lol ... or ask him to.. when he's real busy.. and dont ever remind him ... lol .. all the better if you let ma nature kill it.. lol .. ken https://duckduckgo.com/?q=burgundy+rubber+plant+propagation&t=ffcm&iax=videos&ia=videos