I love this judgey thing people are doing. It's not enough to answer the question and give a little extra information so somebody can learn how to care for the next one, people have to be sure to say you! You're the murderer! [dramatic prairie dog music] and pile on the guilt besides. A rootbound NIP in a four-inch pot might very well have needed to be looked after during the course of a week; a "little splash of water" might or might not have been sufficient. An eight-foot tall plant in a 16-inch pot would be an entirely different story. Or maybe the plant in question was badly overpotted, or severely cramped. "Near" a heat vent could mean directly on top of it, or it could mean a few feet away. NIP actually do like air circulation, they'd just rather it be cool, moist air instead of hot and dry. Nowhere are we told how long this plant had been in the house to begin with, or how much water it had been used to receiving, or how often, or whether there are any signs of pests, or any number of other things. So come on. A little benefit of the doubt, maybe? If nothing else, it's a plant. You kill one, you can buy another. There's really no point to trying to make anybody feel bad about the whole business, too. Crikey.

Norfolk Island Pines do not like to be completely dried out. They should never be sitting in water either, so a good rule of thumb is to wait for the top inch of soil to dry out between waterings. It could also be scorched. They scorch easily in a direct southern or western exposure. It's a shame, but these guys don't re-grow branches that they drop. Norfolk Island Pines are very delicate plants and definitely appreciate being spoiled. Check out houseplantblog.com. The owner is really experienced and has helped me with a lot of my house plants. He is great about answering questions. Hope this helps! -3rd yr Here is a link that might be useful: Houseplantblog.com

I just found this thread while searching for Norfolk Pine transplant information and what I read saddens me. I have a Norfolk in a large container that I was planning to finally put in the ground. It's grown too large for it's pot and is about 8 feet tall. Just like everyone else with one, I bought mine for Christmas. It was 10 years ago when we were moving from Baltimore to Orlando. It was tiny but it made me feel so much better about the Holidays. 4 weeks later when we moved into this house the cute little tree found a home in the patio. A couple years ago I moved it outside thinking that if I didn't do it then I would never get it through the patio door! The tree means a lot to me and I hate to just get rid of it. I don't think I'm ready to 'be done with it', although I'm sure that's good advice.

" 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)