Hi there, no that's a photo of my office - here's another one to make you houseplant fans jealous. I work for a interior landscaping company - this was when we had a massive hire event coming up, not usually quite that full. Still got some of those ex-hire Boston Ferns kicking about from January! As for what was behind the red Philos in the pic before, they are Stromanthe Amabilis if you're looking at the black striped leaves.

I know this is long, Heidi, but I've got personal experience with your situation. To be brief, I'm confident that this tree is not even close to death's door, and would be much better served by fixing the causes of its decline now so it can green up and be much healthier to deal with the stress of repotting next summer. In particular, your ficus was thriving until three months ago, and we know that the decline was caused by low light and poor watering, which means that fixing the root congestion and soil aren't an emergency. To be clear, gardengal is probably right that you could repot now without killing the tree, but because it would be easy to get it green again by correcting the biggest problems now, you would be best off waiting until summer to do major root work and put it in a great growing medium. Then you will be rewarded with a burst of new growth, and you'll soon be pinching growing tips and pruning to control its enthusiastic growth and tell it to fill in all those gaps left by dropped leaves. My experience: I have two smaller roughly five year old ficuses that were completely rootbound and were stuck in a dim corner. I often forgot about watering until leaves started yellowing and dropping, and the I'd fill their tall plastic 'saucers' and left the water there until they stopped soaking it up. In other words, I drowned the roots every time I watered, and maximized the amount of deadly mineral deposits in the soil. Aside from feeble attempts to maintain a few leaves, they had almost stopped growing entirely because their depleted energy reserves made them more vulnerable to attack and only allowed them to put our a few leaves at a time, and most of the buds and leaves that appeared were killed by spider mites. But these are tough plants, so they clung to life for about three years before I finally cared enough to search for answers and found these forums. I immediately started treating the mite infestation, thoroughly flushed the pots (I swear I could hear them sigh with relief), fertilized with a weak solution of Foliage Pro, which has a great ratio of basic nutrients plus all the micronutrients plants need, moved it in front of my best window, which only provides mediocre light, and added bright white (not soft white) 5000k 100W led and cfl bulbs in clamp-on fixtures. Two months later, each branch has about half a dozen new leaves, including some emerging near the stem (a sign that the tree is getting better). It's wonderful to see them getting so green, and I'm already reading up on how to prune them when they get growing again. So Heidi, if I were in your place, I'd start by checking the leaves for spider mites with a bright light and a magnifying glass (they're tiny red dots on the leaves, and you may see little bits of webs on the leaves our branches). Ask about treatment if you find any. Then I'd flush the pot (details below), fertilize with a 3:1:2 ratio fertilizer (miracle gro general purpose granules are easy to find and the right ratio), move it to the best window I had, and put two 100 or brighter led or cfl bulbs in it for 12 hours a day, using a timer. From then on, check soil moisture by pushing a sharpened 3/8" dowel all the way through to the bottom of the pot, and DO NOT WATER until the dowel comes out completely clean and dry (at that point there's still a lot of water inside the soil particles). When that happens, water until about 15% of the water exits the drain holes, let it drain, and then either tilt the pot at 45 degrees for 15-30 minutes after watering to remove excess water, or insert a wick into a drain hole and raise the pot up so the wick won't come in contact with the drained water. You can wait until the surface of the soil is dry to start checking the soil moisture, but after that you should check daily until you have a feel for how long it takes for the poor to dry up. About flushing: flush with lukewarm water, using about ten times the pot's capacity, then give it a weak solution of fertilizer. Use R/O (reverse osmosis) water if possible; water from supermarket water machines are usually $.39 per gallon, and that little pot will maybe need two or three gallons to do the job. My water is hard, so I used R/O water to flush, and because my tap water is hard I use water from my cheap faucet-mounted filter for regular watering. And the reason midsummer is the best time to do something stressful is that 1) ample summer sunlight generates much more energy from the leaves than even a lot of winter sunlight can provide, and 2) the plant is programmed to put energy into new growth in summer, whereas in winter it wants to store it for use in the spring. From several people's experience, including Al (talks), who knows whereof he speaks, if you take two healthy plants and repot one now and one next June, the second will be in better shape next fall than the one you repotted a year earlier. Sorry for my rambling post, and I hope it helps at least a little.

when I used to live in the twin cities, the common lingo used by designers and la types was that they carefully selected plants for your personal landscape based on soil preferences and adability to the area, ie, cold hardiness. And if course you can rhoddies in high pH, clay soil, in a wind tunnel. Ok, so the wind tunnels weren't that common, but my experience tells me that broad regions of the upper Midwest tend to the alkaline, and soils can vary widely over even small distances. When I lived in mn, I was constantly trying things I had no idea of how they'd grow. if you rely on only the known reliables in that weather, your idea of exotic is how many varieties of spire and nine bark can you grow? So i'd try different things. Korean arb? dead as toast before thanksgiving. Japanese Stone pine? still thriving without ever so much as the slightest winter burn almost 20 years later. Turkish filbert? one survived and thrives, one died after a couple years. You try those things that you dare. the risk is failure, the reward is something no one else has. of course, as you move into milder winters, what is defined as questionable becomes quite a bit different.

I have always loved primroses...and spent far too much time and energy trying to grow them in arid East Anglia, in dry sandy soil...so unlike the lush peatiness of my childhood soils. So, inevitably, most are doomed to fail...but not all. For sure the Asiatic bog primulas (p.prolifera, wilsonii, bulleyana, beesianum etc etc.) are non-starters...but auriculas are positively thriving (and have a unique charm...and fragrance as well), while our native vulgaris, vieris and elatior, once established with a little bit of TLC, have spread and colonised parts of my allotment and also, my local cemetary (where I have been sowing various seeds). P.alpicola has survived for the last couple of years while I have sown p.secundiflora this year. In short, the primrose genus is large and varied, but auriculas are perfect little treasures - good for pot culture, a delight to grow and quick to proliferate. Vine weevils find them irresistible, but nematode treatments are available.