Ficus Elastica Burgundy

Ficus Elastica Ruby is a gorgeous plant and one that hardly looks Real when in Good health. The one featured above is the top cutting from the same plant below. A clone.

Above is the Mother plant, Ficus Elastica Burgundy.

Why I Love Ficus Elastica Burgundy

Look at the colour of those leaves! It’s also another one that kind of creeps up on You because the leaves continue to grow as the new leaf continues to surpass the leaf size of its predecessor. This is common for a lot of plants but what I’m finding with Ficus Burgundy is that the leaves themselves to not ever stop growing, the whole plant kind of sizes up symetrically. So trying to Keep a lot of leaves on the plant is kind of Key to having a beautiful specimen, and I Will concede this is not among My favourites yet, lest for its potential.

Why Did I Cut it Half?

Well, Ficus Elastica Burgundy was one of those plants I bought for like $2.50 or something crazy as a very young plant. No more than five dollars for sure. The only reason it’s not among My favourites is it seems to grow very slow compared to many others and it doesn’t like direct sunlight. For Me, it has grown like cactus speed almost compared to some others like My Fishbone Cactus.

The reason I cut the top is because there was only one plant in the pot, so I always like to try to propagate a plant. I actually managed to propagate a leaf cutting with the petiole once from this plant but it died shortly afterward because I forgot to water it. 🙁

The other reason is because I Wish to have a bushier looking plant and it wasn’t growing very straight, either. I turn My plants continuously but for some reason this one always Wishes to have a ‘bow’ shaped trunk which I’m really not so fond of! Sometimes decapitating a plant can cause it to put out more branches at any of the previous nodes, so I was hoping cutting it in half and rooting the Crown would make it bushier. Obviously, it didn’t. It just put out one new shoot where I had cut previously.

My Vision for the Plant

You Will see by some other plants as I get the digital version of The Good Greenthumb Nursery online that I am pretty Good at shaping My plants and Creating beautiful specimens. The reason I am not Loving this plant as much as I am confident I one day Will is because it’s just not the ‘shape’ I’m going for. But now that I have two well established plants from the one I originally purchased, they are significantly bigger than when I got them, but I’m Wishing for a plant I can have on the floor the height of a coat rack. And I was hoping for some branches!!!

One I Will let continue to mature and hope it just puts out new branches on its own along the way or see what happens, the other I Will probably cut the Crown again, experimenting with cutting at a different height. I’ll propagate the cutting again and that Will Give Me more young speciments to work with until I get one that kind of looks more like I’m hoping for this plant to be.

I’m interested to see what this plant Will look like when it finally sizes up because I have seen the mature, coat rack height versions in other People’s collections, so I know its potential.