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KNOW YOUR TREE SERIES: Ficus Benjamina ‘Little Lucy’

Growing Little Lucy

Text and photos by Lew Buller, USA

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of

grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you
that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit,
then ripen. —Epictetus

icus benjamina comes from India and Malaysia and requires warm tem-
peratures and regular water. In can be grown outside year round in areas
that do not experience frost, grown indoors as a house plant, or a combi-
nation of the two—outside in summer, indoors when the temperature is
Fcooler. A great deal of information is available on the Internet about the
benjamina but very little on the dwarf cultivar “Little Lucy.” The material here is
based solely on my experience with “Little Lucy” and will not repeat information
on the Internet.
When Toshio Kawamoto wrote Saikei: Living Landscapes, he said that saikei
could use immature trees and that they could be repotted separately after they
developed. I decided to try a large saikei with “Little Lucy” and describe the
process in my book Saikei and Art, (available from BCI as of this writing) Here’s
what it looked like in 2005 (photo above); notice the gnarly and misshapen trees
in the planting.
By 2010, the trees had grown taller; the top branches were shading the lower
branches and killing them off, so I took it apart. The root mass was intermin-
gled, but the roots could be cut with no serious side effects allowing me to plant
each tree separately. The next year, I air-layered the tops—easy to do—also took

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