Chinese Elm Bonsai

7 years ago

I am in the UK and have had an indoor Chinese Elm Bonsai since March, and has been healthy.

Over the last couple of weeks 80% of the leaves have shed, and the rest look like they're about to drop or if you touch them they do. I have watered it less because it has needed less, otherwise nothing has really changed other than the weather - it's now autumn and it's cooler. It's not pot b ound, or certainly was no where near being so about 2 months ago when I checked.

Is it normal for them to lose all their leaves? I am sure within a couple of days it's going to be entirely bare. When the trees outside were bare in the March spring time, this tree had leaves.

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Comments (4)

Dave
7 years ago
last modified: 7 years ago
Some of them should lose their leaves. The one I have does that as well. A photo would be helpful.

They need a certain amount of chill hours in the winter. Temps constantly under 40° F. From about November - march.

These are plants I wouldn't keep inside in the winter.

Last year I paid a bonsai place $60 to winter mine is a green house that kept exactly at 36° F.
floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK
7 years ago
There is a dedicated Bonsai Forum where you can obtain further information. They're not really houseplants as such since your elm is a hardy deciduous tree by nature. Have you recently turned the heating on?
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Dear micadams, I don't know about your specific tree, but I use natural water for my trees,(no chlorine or other anti-bacterial chemicals, chlorine is an acid!) i catch rain water in a clean plastic bucket, (not water from a roof drip!) I place my bucket in the open where water from the sky is all that enters it. Also, let mother nature help, i put 2 earthworms in each pot 2 worms will mate and keep their species continuing. I have had similar problems with my trees,First,remove your tree from it's pot and wash the soil away from the roots,(natural water)Second soak the roots in a mixture of natural water and miracle grow for a couple of days,Away from direct sun light, then re-pot with new soil. Also, sunlight doesn't mean put it in a window where the sun shines directly on it. You can close the blinds and let the light defuse through to your tree. Sometimes, keep it in the dark for 2 or 3 days, this will cause the tree to "strive" for life and encourage growth of new leaves to help with photosynthesis. All life wants to live, to make a person hungry, deprive him of food for a short time, he will then eat heartily. Same with trees!
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Hi - the idea of the 'dry' soil is so that you can water at will (or within reason actually) without being afraid of drowning or rotting roots, but with a C. elm, it's acceptable to replace some of that with e.g. 1/3 soil. Btw - a good idea would have been to start a new thread so we wouldn't have had to plow through the old stuff ('09) to get to yours... Pruning is done to achieve certain effects, not just 'because', so until you know why you want to prune anything, and where the results will lead, I'd advise not doing it (except perhaps to de-bush things a bit, neaten them up) until then. Without knowing more about e.g. temperature the tree's in, whether you're using a humidity tray that's NOT allowing water to wick into the pot, how many hours of light it gets daily, and how often it is watered and how much, it's hard to advise more. This post was edited by moochinka on Tue, Apr 1, 14 at 17:26
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To help with watering, get a pack of the little bamboo shis-kebab skewers from the grocery store. put one in the soil and pull it out in about an hour. It the skewer is moist do not water, if it comes out dry, water. It's kind of like putting a toothpick in a cake to see if it is done. Also, every time you water, pick it up and try to remember how heavy it is. When it is noticeably lighter it will be time to water. Use these two in conjunction for better accuracy. This post was edited by spaceman13 on Fri, Aug 8, 14 at 9:58
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Hi, first of all, tap water and watering from above vs immersion is good! Immersion is not, and it's so difficult to tell anyone otherwise when half the 'care' tags on trees tell you to dunk them... so don't blame yourself for the method. It's possible you didn't water often enough, it's possible you watered too often, possible you didn't allow enough time for water to reach the drain holes so only half the roots got a drink, and if you can remember which and what of those was done how, please say... It's also possible it didn't get enough light, or that the tree knew it was autumn and lost its leaves appropriately, but that something else was wrong. Did you fertilize routinely? Without more info it's hard to guess at what happened. How long had you had it? And have you had central heating on - for how long?
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Dave
7 years ago
last modified: 7 years ago
Good point. Go check that part of the forum.

Fyi, people buy these trees all the time and think they're houseplants. They keep them inside year round where they go through a steady decline and eventually die.

They NEED chill hours.

The only reason I have one is because my girlfriends mother did just that. After a few years of her wondering why it didn't look so good, she gave it to me and now I have to deal with it. It's not something I would have personally bought or wanted.

It needs to be under 40° F but it can't handle extreme cold as I was told the trunk can actually burst.

An unheated garage or something similar would work. It also does not need light when it sheds it leaves.
tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)
7 years ago
Anything your tree does is normal, because they respond to stimuli in predictable ways. The trick is figuring out the cause:effect relationship.

Shorter days (actually it's the longer nights, but that's a different conversation) push the tree toward dormancy, and periods of cold seal the deal. Your tree is semi-deciduous, meaning it can keep some or most of it's leaves over the winter, depending on where it's grown and how cold it is. It DOESN'T want to be kept indoors at any time, unless it's a very short stay to protect it from a flood or dangerously low temps. Ideally it would be over-wintered at temps no lower than -2c and no higher than 5.5c.

It's not likely your tree would lose all of its leaves due to the temps it's exposed to in the UK so far this fall, so you need to look to other issues. First on the list would be over-watering. Where some of my bonsai were watered daily in July-Aug, they're now watered every 4-5 days. Those watered every 3-4 days are getting watered once per week or every 10 days. If you didn't adjust watering habits similarly, and especially if the plant was in a soil too water-retentive for the plant's wellbeing, that might be as far as you need to go for your answer. If you were watering while the soil still looked moist, that strengthens the probability that over-watering is in play. If you KNOW it's not over-watering, you need to provide more info about how it's been cared for. Indoors? Fertilizer? NPK %s?, Spray/treat with anything? ..... whatever you can think of that describes what you're providing, culturally.

FWIW - I probably have 15-20 bonsai in the Ulmus family - many of them have been with me for MANY years, so I'm very familiar with their cultural wants/needs.

Al

Chinese Elm Bonsai

Comments (4)

Dave

floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK

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Dave

tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)

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