Here’s an example of a little tree that you might run across easily, at a retail store or maybe your club’s raffle table. Hell, I’ve seen them at Walmart before. It’s a willow leaf ficus, Ficus salicaria (often misnamed Ficus nerifolia, F. Salicifolia, F. Subulata, et al).

This one happens to be a root cutting , meaning the “trunk” used to be a root off a larger tree that was chopped off during a repot, saving the smaller hair roots, and planted in its own pot. When you make root cuttings from F. salicaria, you only tend to get new shoots from the top of the “trunk”, like below:

Thats the one drawback with a root cutting on a willow leaf. There was an infamous root cutting I showed several years ago, not as a bonsai, but as a highly directional companion plant (and people couldn’t understand that concept. It…
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