Weeping fig

The weeping fig grows across southern Asia and northern Australia, where it becomes a very large tree with a dense canopy of small glossy leaves. Indoors it is the classic office and hotel tree, and it has a reputation for being temperamental that is entirely earned by one habit: it responds to any change in its conditions by dropping a great many leaves. Understanding that habit is most of what there is to know. A weeping fig that is left alone in a good position is an easy plant that lives for decades.

Light

Bright indirect light, close to a window with the harshest midday sun filtered. It will hold on in a dimmer room but grows thin and sheds from the inside of the canopy outwards.

What matters more than the exact level is that it stays the same. This plant adapts to a change in light by growing a new set of leaves suited to the new conditions, and discarding the old set first, which is alarming to watch and entirely normal. Move it and it will shed. Move it back and it will shed again.

Water

Water when the top 3 to 4 cm of compost is dry, roughly every eight days in summer and every fortnight in winter, and let it drain properly.

The difficulty is that both overwatering and underwatering produce the same symptom, which is falling leaves. Feel the compost before you decide what to change. Damp compost with yellowing leaves means water less and check that the pot is draining. Bone dry compost with dry brown leaves means water more evenly. Guessing wrong makes it worse.

Where to put it, once

Choose the position before you buy the plant, and consider what it will be like in winter as well as summer. It wants bright light, a temperature that stays above 15 degrees, and no draughts: not a doorway, not a spot beside a window that gets opened in winter, and not directly over a radiator. Once it is there, do not move it, do not turn it around every week, and do not repot it unless the roots are genuinely bursting out.

A plant treated that way stops shedding within a season and settles into steady growth.

Feeding and repotting

Feed at half strength monthly from spring to early autumn, and stop in winter. Repot in spring, one size up, only when the plant is genuinely potbound, which for a weeping fig may be every third year. Expect a round of leaf drop afterwards and do not respond to it by moving anything else.

Pruning and propagation

Prune in spring. Cutting the longest shoots back by up to a third makes the plant branch and keeps a tree from becoming a thin collection of long stems, and the plant takes hard pruning well. Wear gloves, because the sap is a skin irritant and stains fabric.

Cuttings root reasonably well with warmth. Take a stem with three or four leaves in early summer, blot the cut until the sap stops, and push it into damp compost under a clear cover somewhere warm and bright. Air layering is better for a tall bare stem and gives a full sized plant in one season.

Ailments

Leaf drop is the plant’s answer to change, and the cure is to stop changing things. Yellow leaves need a finger in the compost before a diagnosis. Scale and spider mites are the two pests to watch for, and both show on the leaf undersides first, so it is worth turning a few leaves over whenever you water. The ledger below has the rest.