When you (meaning me) don't know where to start, you have to fall back on the basics. When we garden in containers, we need to take responsibility for making sure our plants are getting a full compliment of nutrients in the right ratio and at a concentration neither to high or too low. I'm going to link you to some basic information that will hopefully leave you feeling like resolution for your plant's problems is within your reach. Becoming a good grower doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't even come automatically with years and years of experience. The key is to learn enough, fast enough, so we can avoid being bit on the butt by our mistakes, and by our shortcomings relative to our understanding of the basic needs of plants. If you want to start a conversation that will almost certainly leave you with some fresh ways of looking at how to make your plants happy, we can do that. First though, let me suggest you read the thread I'll link you to below. Hopefully, it will leave you with questions and the feeling you'd like to learn even more. Al Here is a link that might be useful: An overview

Hard to tell based on the information, but in general terms if the plant is trying to develop its roots there is little energy left over for growing branches/leaves. So yes, in a word, patience. :-] ez

Wow - that is a gorgeous scheff! I have some seeds that I'm waiting to germinate (apparently it takes 40 days!?) and my plan was to bind them and similarly allow inosculation to fuse the trunks. The seeds have not yet sprouted and I'm losing interested - its not fun watering a pot of dirt when you have a nice plant already, lol! As far as the form, I looked for a scheff that had a central trunk and I think mine does (your's certainly does), while most seem to more-so fall into the clump (banyan?) style, like a dense forest. I always like some form of nebari, but I see what your saying about the neagari (exposed roots) looking spider-like. At first, I felt it drew away from the central trunk, and made it more of the clump/banyan style plant. Looking at my scheff, a spider didn't come to mind, but I do think the neagari provides a sense of movement - for me, in an almost anthropomorphic way: the image that comes to my mind is a person walking through a swamp or bog and leaning to the side in order to pull his/her feet out of the mud. A sort of struggle to move forward and survive that I think are central to the nature of designing a small tree to look like an older, weather-torn specimen. Considering that, I actually intentionally expand the roots: when potting the plan, I washed off nearly an inch of dirt that was over the root system. Maybe not ideal if you are going for a small bonsai (shohin or something), but I'd rather give it some size personally. I'd love to know your thoughts about ramification for a scheff. I had 3 golden cappelas that I sold / gave away recently and my experience with schefferlas is that sometimes you cut the terminal and another one grows back with no ramification. Other times, the terminal does split and even a shoot/bud comes out lower on the plant, but I haven't found consistency in this.

Update on the situation - I saw some more infected leaves, and this time, I found what appear to be eggs. I also saw other (unidentifiable) alien structures on my plant, shown below: An "egg"? A possible other "egg" Up-close shot of the "veins" Not even sure what these are. There are some more images, that may or may not make things more clear.