well most plants can be grown indoors for a long time but alot of them aren't really permanent residents , eventually they get too large or they just become unsuitable for whatever reason. the problem with using a pot that is neither small or big is that a plant still may become huge which makes it really difficult to repot. i always use big pots for bold specimen plants , for example i got a indoor banana which isn't too big because i got it in a really small pot, when im going to repot it im going to choose a very large tub - anything in between wouldn't be practical because it will still get huge and eventually gets too rootbound and i need to repot it again. Choose a good looking pot, square or round. wide or long , contrast coloured or plain. Get a decent looking pot that you think will fit this plant and its enviroment. repotting large specimen can be a pain in the ass, there is no way around it and it will make a mess. Alot of plants can be pruned to decrease size and weight and make repotting easier - this cannot be done with the norfolk pine, once you prune off and lower or middle branches they will not regrow or come back. Remember eventually these kinds of trees will lose lower branches just like most mature trees, lower branches that do not receive enough light because the upper branches are casting shade. if one branch drops that not a problem but when multiple lower branches droop and drop it needs feeding , repotting and a fitting watering schedule. one option of course would trying a garden center in you area or a professional horticulturalist.

I had talked to a local nursery guy yrs ago about tip rooting the leader and he said that rooting an NIP leader he thought would be almost impossible without PERFECT conditions, not sure what that is, or even if there was if that would matter. I tried rooting three leaders once that grew after cutting the original one and nothing rooted after a month or so, they would just die. And he also stated that if you tried rooting a cutting of a side branch, that it would continue to grow like a "side" branch, that it would continue to grow "sideways" not vertical. I guess if you wanted to start over, you can either try air layering, buy a new smaller NIP, or grow another one from seed. Billy Rae

without a pic.. its hard to say much of anything ... i would stop repotting it ... its is stressed not hungry.. no fert ... i am surprised the houseplant forum died ... ken

" I could kick myself because years ago, I passed up a nice sized specimen." You passed on a specimen whose carcass you might have been digging out of the ground this week, when the record rains of early summer killed it. As I'm always saying, at least hundreds, probably thousands, of (expensive, usually) monkey puzzles have been planted by gardeners along the east coast since the 60s and before, and yet we hardly know of many mature specimens. I can't remember if you are on LI or in NJ, but either place should have plenty of mature specimens - as they do of other desirable, sufficiently-hardy collectibles of the 20th century like Sequoiadendron. Just in my random existence, not even involving contact with collectors of rare plants, I know of one in the neighborhood in Columbia, MD, where I briefly lived in the mid 2000s that was killed off by a wet spell one summer. I never even spoke to the person who owned it, I just noticed it prominently planted in their yard. It was 8' tall and had probably been there a few years, looked established and healthy one year but was gone the next. I once found a primary source/gardening journal in google books from the 1920s attesting to their difficulty in CONUS non-maritime climates! Specifically on Long Island IIRC. It's pretty clear that in places with cool summers to their liking, winters are too cold, and where winters are sufficiently mild, summers are too hot. The one at Polly Hill Arboretum has supposedly died back a few times, to the trunk. (that's just what their website once said about it: seems a bit implausible to me but the take home message is: was probably planted decades ago, yet is not a mature specimen even in that somewhat benign climate. NB the Fairweather guys claimed to have found a huge Austrocendrus on Cape Cod or the islands, which would have been the only one of the east coast) The known US east coast ones over 25' are: The Barnes Arboretum (who also had the horticultural savvy to bring the northernmost Sequoia on the east coast to maturity: the key for both probably just leaving them alone and not "feeding" them), the one in Bethesda MD that survived <<0F in 1994, and one at an old estate in Wilmington, DE, that was cut down for "not looking English enough." (the best of all possible anecdotes concerning the overall idiocy of most people who practice so-called "landscape architecture" in this country)