It's not at all unusual for variegation in plants to be unstable and for plants to revert to their green phase after a time. Stability of variegated plants has a lot to do with where the variegation itself originated in the plant. Mutations that originated in a specific layer of meristematic cells have the greatest chance of remaining stable for years to come, but if the mutation originated outside of this layer, the chances of that mutation remaining stable are far slimmer. Variegated plants begin to lose their contrast and turn fully green under low light conditions. Increasing light (to a point) can reverse the trend. Variegated plants need more light than their green counterparts to ward of stress/strain due to low light levels, but they are also unable to tolerate light conditions as bright as their green cousins. This makes them often rather fussy (about light levels), and less vigorous as a result of their reduced levels of chlorophyll (the green pigment so crucial to photosynthesis/food-making). If you move the plant to a sunny location and the variegation doesn't return, the plant has likely reverted. If it does begin to return, watch carefully for the silverish/whitish symptoms of photo-oxidation (sunburn) and move the plant to dappled shade as soon as symptoms appear. When you have a variegated plant, and you want it to remain that way, it's important that you remove branches supporting foliage that is obviously all green as soon as they appear. If you don't, it's very likely the more vigorous green foliage will take over the entire plant. Al

If you want to go look at some benghalensis, you should go to the zoo. They have several trees and several variations. There are also other types of ficus all over the place. The biggest one that I have seen in the valley is in the lakes neighborhood south of baseline between Rural and McKlintock. It hangs over an ally that runs along houses that are on the south side of the southern most lakes on the west side of the development. It is REALLY big. I asked a guy that lives by it about it. He thought it was a magnolia and said that rumor has it that one of the original tenants of an apartment complex on the other side of the fence planted it when the area was developed. There are quite a few unusual ficus in that neighborhood. There are also some benghalensis that Scottsdale planted near the Osborn hospital. I'm not sure, but I think that the beautiful ficus planted in front of the Vine restaurant in Tempe on Apache may be a rubiginosa (if not, perhaps a macrophylla?) I always though it was just another elastica until a got a closer look. GREAT TRUNK! Looks twisted and knarly. If anyone knows for sure what type of ficus that tree is, please divulge the information. PenBuilder

No personal experience with them but the search does pull up a number of previous discussions about growing them you might want to browse through. Some of them are from the Trees forum and others from this and the Tropicals forum Growing banyan discussions Dave

You have 2 options. You can cut the top back to a leaf that is growing back toward an imaginary line straight up from the center of the pot, or you can cut back harder so you take the crook out of the picture and make the top straight. The grower cut the trunk back and that's how the branch that became the new leader grew. What the grower should have done and you can still do is this: Imagine this as your tree and the leaves are branches. ^^^ When the grower cut the top back ^^^, he cut it back to about where the knot is, and the branch that turned into the new leader (that would be the one just below the knot) grew at the same angle as the leaf stem. What he SHOULD have done is, cut the top back only part way so there was a stub left, then tie the new branch to the stub so it grows straight: **************************************************************************************************** Your idea to prune back to the leaf growing back toward the center is what I described above. It's ok to do that if the distance from the soil line to the first crook in the trunk is longer than the distance from the crook in the trunk to the branch growing back toward the middle. IOW, as your tree zig-zags, the distance between the direction changes has to grow increasingly smaller as your eye moves from bottom to top. This is because (in nature), branches get much closer together near the top of trees, and that's what your eye expects to see. If you DON'T see the sections between turns getting shorter toward the top, it will look odd, even if you can't put your finger on the precise reason why. If the distances are transposed, I'd cut the crook out and do what I illustrated above. Al