Maybe the curl is wilt? LOL! J/K. I don't know why I keep this plant around, habit and sentimentality, it's been through most of my life with me. Just because it's indestructible doesn't mean it isn't fussy if one wants a good-looking one ALL of the time, yet in a too-small pot. I guess it's just like one of those bad kids a mother loves anyway, overlooking the bad behavior and unkempt appearance. Why don't I just stop trying to cram it into the same little hanging basket? Also forgot to mention that the number of individuals in a pot would affect how quickly the pot fills with roots. There's 5-7 in that trimmed clump in my hand. That's a lot for such a small pot and I know that. A single plant in the same pot would "last longer" but I like the appearance with a ton of leaves and many babies, even if it causes the plant to decline more quickly and repotting to come more often. If it was in some dark stuffy corner, it wouldn't grow as fast, there's that too. There's a whole gray area between just up-potting undisturbed roots and the drastic pruning from my pic. One could choose to trim less overall, or just remove the biggest "carrots." Or separate individual plants and just trim the roots of one. Braid them. (Just seeing if anyone read this far.)

Well, what's done is done. We did the best we could.... I was pretty upset yesterday. More than anything I felt a breach of trust from the nursery. I mean how can they do that to their loyal customer base? They should be ashamed. Seriously. We never did get even half the soil out of the plants. We let them soak for hours in the bathtub. I thought of adding a tiny drop of dishwashing liquid, but I didn't... So I handed dh the carpet knife and I said here, do it, I can't watch. He said what do you want me to do with this, and I said make 1 inch deep cuts from top to bottom all around. Basically, he thinks we just killed the shrubs... I was able to spread a small amount of roots out. The bottom roots were the easiest. The very tippy top roots were completely cemented and tangled. There was very little I could do... I figure in a few days the shrubs will wither and die. :( I still feel like calling the nursery and asking her how they could do this to their customers, but maybe rootbound pots are the industry "standard" these days.... The real adventure began though after dh got the plants out of the bathtub and brought them outside. Dh let out the plug and came downstairs and we never thought about the bathtub until later. It was plugged. And I mean PLUGGED! Dh had to snake out the drain. He pulled out roots and plant media that was stuck. He had to go into town to get Liquid Plumbr. After the tub was unclogged, he filled the tub with water, then took the unopened bottle of bleach tablets I had just bought that morning for laundry, and he dumped the whole bottle in! I'm going to confess that I did add a tiny bit of Lime to the soil, and I did mix in a bag of garden soil I got from the nursery. It got lost in all our native soil, but it made me feel like we gave a tiny "boost" to the soil. In the end, I decided to add those amendments since I want to make the soil as generous to the Lilacs as I can, especially after what they just experienced yesterday... This post was edited by ilovemytrees on Thu, May 29, 14 at 9:27

I did cut of the trunk down to the highest water sucker growing out of it. First did a scratch test and the trunk showed no green, but when I cut it off I could see the slightest bit of green beneath the bark. Maybe I should have waited until that part of the trunk turned brittle, but now at least the tree can at least put its effort toward making food and feeding its roots with those lower water sucker branches that are growing out of the trunk. Then maybe next year the roots will be established well enough to send up some shoots from the roots and I could then cut the old trunk down and allow the tree to focus its efforts on developing new multiple main leader trunks that should have better balance between them in trunk diameter.

The original poster simply asked for the BEST way to loosen root bound plants. I've done my best to describe the best way, based on plant physiology. Injuring roots by tearing, crushing, etc. causes a different reaction from the plant than the simple creation of new roots at a sharp cut. There are many other methods, obviously. And plants will typically recover from a certain amount of harsh handling. The 'standard', however, and the one that follows the guidelines for BMPs (best management practices) is to use a sharp tool of some kind to cleanly sever the roots, rather than mangle them. Why should we do something that causes injury to the plant, instead of accomplishing something beneficial? All of this reminds me of a landscape worker who was in charge of installing several hundred 1 to 7 gallon container plants at a commercial project. His method was pretty unique: He removed the plants from their pots, laid them on the ground and proceeded to smash the root ball with his foot. Ay-yi-yi