Confusions in Green Island and Green Mound Ficus Names

A joint blog with Kasu Bonsai (Jose Luis Lopez Casulleras), Spain

Green Island and Green Mound are two very popular Ficus microcarpa cultivars for tropical bonsai. Both have thick leaves. Several internet articles show how to distinguish them by their leaf shapes.

Green Island Ficus Ficus microcarpa ‘Green Island’ aka Wax Fig, Panda Ficus, Dollar Ficus	Green Mound Ficus Ficus microcarpa ‘crassifolia’ aka Long Island, Wax Fig, Panda Ficus, Korea Ficus
Heavy-textured leaves, a little longer than wide, the shape would be described botanically as “orbicular’ with only an obscure tip.	Same heavy texture but more than twice as long as wide; widest a little above the midpoint of the blade (i.e., obovate) with a blunt but obviously pointed tip.

So the rounder leave ficus is Green Island and the more elongated leave ficus is Green Mound or sometimes called Long Island. Seems simple enough, but there are problems with these names.

In this blog, we will explain the confusions, resurrect their original names based on Taiwan literature, where these two ficus came from.

What Are the Confusions with These Names?

After publishing my blog on the synonyms of Kinmen, Tiger Bark, Kingman, Kimeng, Golden Gate F. microcarpa, Kasu Bonsai (co-author Jose) wrote and asked me to look into how Green Island and Green Mound got their names. As both came from Taiwan, he hoped I could find information in Chinese texts from Taiwan.

The situation is also confusing in Taiwan because some bonsai people simply call both of them ‘Green Island’ ficus such as the winning ficus shown below regardless of whether the leaves are round or elongated. However, a segment of the bonsai people such as the Taiwan Bonsai World no longer lists Green Island as a ficus used for bonsai on their website and lists the rounder leave ficus by its original name, ‘crassifolia’, as described in the literature. On the other hand, people interested in plant identifications are not so confused because their identities are clear in plant field guides. So ‘Green Island’ confusion is largely confined within bonsai circle.

This 2014 Taichung Bonsai Exhibition winner with elongated leaves was labeled Green Island Ficus. H.F. Yan wrote an article commenting on it and correcting it’s name to Ficus microcarpa cv. ‘I-Non’, which was originally described and named by J.C. Liao in 1982.

Fortunately, there is an article by H.F. Yan, the curator of the Botanical Garden of the Taichung Museum of Natural Sciences, who is also a bonsai enthusiast and tried to clarify these confusions so that people could call them correctly by their original names. He further noted that ‘Green Island’ Ficus is actually the name of a totally different species, F. pubernervis, which is endemic to Green Island (Lu Dao. Yes, it is the name of a small outer volcanic island in Taiwan); it is so named for where it is found. It is unclear how it got confused with bonsai’s ‘Green Island’. After reading Yan’s article, we further verified their descriptions with photos and illustrations in The Taxonomic Revisions of the Family Moraceae inTaiwan Ed. (II), a monograph by the late J.C. Liao who was involved in the naming these two ficus.

Since Yan’s article is in Chinese and is probably not much read in the West, we summarized his clarifications in this blog. A key feature of Yan’s article is he illustrated and compared the leaves of the four microcarpa cultivars used for bonsai. We added notes for each leaf illustrated.

A: Round thick-leave ficus, called ‘Green Island’ in the West and by some bonsai people in Taiwan. This is a naturally occurring variety found growing on the coastal limestones in the Hengchun Peninsular in southern tip of Taiwan. The plant is a small shrub, sometimes creeping, and has nearly round thick leaves. It was described by W.H.Shieh in 1963 and named ‘crassifolia‘ which means thick leave in Latin. Its Chinese name is ‘Hou Ye Rong’ which means thick-leave ficus. For unknown reasons and don’t know when, the name became ‘Green Island’ and got confused with the actual Green Island F. pubernervis.

Since it is a coastal plant with a compact growth habit, it is a popular low maintenance landscape plant in Florida and was voted 2001 ‘Plant of the Year’ by The Florida Nurserymen and Growers Association.

Detail descriptions and more photos of the leaves, branches, leaf stalk and syconia of ‘crassifolia’ can be found in this online identification guide

B: Elongated thick-leave ficus, called ‘Green Mound’ in the West and by some bonsai people in Taiwan without distinguishing it from the round leave ‘crassifolia’ variety. It was described By J.C. Liao in 1982 as a new cultivar found growing in the I-Lan Agriculture School. Liao named it ‘I-Non’, pronounced like ‘Yi Non’, which is a contracted name of the agriculture school in Chinese. ‘I-Non’ is certainly hard to pronounce in the West and meaningless to most people, which might be the reason why it is called ‘Green Mound’ for its growth form when sold as a landscape plant. Some online Florida nursery trade articles give its scientific name as var. ‘crassifolia’, which is wrong, it should be Ficus microcarpa cv. ‘I-Non’.

Landscape ‘I-Non’, note the elongated thick leaves. Photo from Liao’s Revision of Moraceae of Taiwan’

Ficsu microcarpa cv. ‘I-Non’, correctly named by some bonsai people. This photo is from a Taiwan internet bonsai discussion forum..

C: Large leaf Ficus microcarpa main species.

D: Medium size leaves microcarpa used for bonsai, such as the popular ‘Kinmen’, aka ‘Tiger Bark’. As far as we know, this cultivar has not been described in any scientific journal.

E: Small-leave microcarpa cultivar described and named ‘pusillifolia‘ by Liao in 1989. ‘Pusillifolia‘ means small leaves, it is also called a Melon Seed ficus in bonsai circle. This cultivar was discovered growing in the Botanical Garden of the National Chung Hshing University.

What Should We Call These Two Ficus?

The use of common names is irrelevant in the binomial naming system, they are just for the convenience of we lay people, hobbyists and for nursery trades. However, cultivar and variety names are valid, they are denoted by cv. and var. after their binomial names. ‘I-Non’ and ‘crassifolia’ are cultivar and variety names, respectively.

‘Green Mound’, ‘Green Island’, and several other names like Long Island, Panda Ficus etc., are entrenched common names but not the original names, and it would be very very difficult and near impossible to change. For example, many people still use the name F. retusa for F. microcarpa even it was corrected decades ago.

We propose resurrecting their original names as they were first described. It is a respect to the botanists who discovered and described them. After all, if your parents name you Paul and someone mistakenly call you Peter, wouldn’t you want to correct it and be called Paul?

So…

Round leave variety be called by its original name ‘crassifolia’ or ‘Hou Ye Rong’ which has the same meaning in Chinese but would be more difficult to call or remember by non Chinese speakers. The full name is Ficus microcarpa var. ‘crassifolia’.

Rounder-leave Ficus microcarpa var. ‘crassifolia’.

Elongated leave cultivar be called by its original name ‘I-Non’ which the original author intended to honor the I-Lan Agriculture School where the cultivar was discovered. The full name is Ficus microcarpa cv. ‘I-Non’.

Elongated-leave Ficus microcarpa cv. ‘I-Non’.

For taxonomists who took broader views in naming species, called the ‘lumpers’, names like ‘I-Non’, ‘crassifolia’ etc. are not needed for the overall picture, and all these names are relegated to just Ficus microcarpa. For example, Berg and Corner lumped them all into F. microcarpa in their Revisions of Malanesia Ficus.

An Unusual Ficus Bonsai Style From Taiwan

Huge massive trees with umbrella-like canopies and neatly arranged pads are hallmarks of Taiwan’s ficus bonsai. They are created and modeled after an old majestic Ficus microcarpa in Tainan’s National Cheng Kung University campus.

F. microcarpa at the National Cheng Kung University campus

An Award Winning F. microcarpa modeled after the National Cheng Kung University ficus, height: 87 cm, by Hisu Yang

Over the last decade, there have been increasing criticisms among some Taiwanese artists that too many of their ficus bonsai look like each other, prompting comment like “if you have seen one, you have seen a hundred”. The artist of the above award winning “standard” ficus, Mr. Hsiu Yang, 杨修, did something unusual; he created two “non-traditional” ficus bonsai.

Planted in stainless steel tray, size of tray is 6-8 foot long if I recall correctly.

Another Mr. Yang’s creation. Note a cut wound filled with clear red resin. He had a spot light illuminating that red resin.

When I saw these two ficus at the Cheng Mei Cultural Park (成美文化園), I was shocked.  I would not be surprised to see bonsai styled this way in China, but in Taiwan?  However, these trees looked familiar and they appealed to me; I could appreciate them because I have seen oddly shaped ficus just like these two growing in suburban parks, street corners and village squares.

Taiwan is densely populated and is very crowded. Although ficus are widely grown as landscape trees in subdivisions and small community parks, as they grow their extended limbs eventually encroach nearby buildings, fences, etc., they compete for space with human dwellings.

When these encroaching limbs were cut off, since bonsai rules do not apply during tree trimming, new branches grow at odd angles and finally into a form which I could only ascribed to “a cohabitation between ficus and human competing for space”.

A ficus I saw in Lukang, which has become too big and too close to a shop house. It ended up a mushroom shape.

To many bonsai eyes, they are ugly looking trees but are nonetheless alternative “natural” models for bonsai inspirations. There is a Chinese proverb which says “there is beauty when ugliness is at its extreme,” and it might apply in this case.

Here are some photos from Taiwan streets and squares I downloaded from the internet with their respective sources:

An old ficus growing in the Qing dynasty military governor’s compound in Kinman. https://kinmen.travel/image/10494/1024×768

Old ficus in Kinman Island. Source: http://papilio0204.pixnet.net/album/photo/138052177

A plaque, not in this photo, said it was planted in 1886.

I thought these urban ficus inspired Mr. Yang’s creations but I was wrong!  I later found out he got his Master degree from the Mingdao University using the ficus in the stainless steel container as a project, and his thesis was entitled “A Study of Bonsai Sculpture Creative Method and Ficus microcarpa Linn. f. Example.” 

In his thesis, Mr. Yang discussed applying aesthetic principles to bonsai creations. This ficus was created based on his Buddhist believes of causality; aerial roots were used to create a more organic tree without an obvious massive trunk, and the whole creation process represented the three stages of past, present and future in Buddhism.

I do not understand the religious and philosophical meanings in this creation but I can relate to it because I have seen ficus growing in crowded urban areas. There are a lot of intentional “imperfections” from partly peeled irregular aerial roots, crisscross branches to unclosed large wounds, called “horse eyes,” throughout the bonsai. They are very different from the Japanese aesthetics of perfections.

Anyway, please enjoy detailed photos of these two unusual ficus bonsai.

Ficus in Stainless Steel Container: 

Multiple trunks created with aerial roots; they are not fused together into massive trunk we see in most Taiwan ficus bonsai.

Fused irregular aerial roots as part of the “organic” trunks. Even the moss dressings were not neatly arranged like those in Japanese bonsai exhibits.

Large unclosed wounds, “horse eyes,” accentuate imperfections.

Ficus with Filled Red Resin:

A light inside a 5-gallon white plastic bucket was aimed directly at the resin to capture the “tree goblin”.

No massive nebari for this tree.

The Cheng Mei Cultural Park is a beautiful garden worth a visit if you go to Taiwan.

Why Do I Repot a Big Ficus From a Ceramic Pot into a Wooden Box?

This Ficus microcarpa was potted into a 24″ round ceramic pot in 2015. By 2018, it needed repotting again but I procrastinated and did not do it in 2019 either. I finally repotted it a few days ago, but into a wooden box.  I jokingly said it was because I needed to reduce the overall weight. That is true but there are more important horticultural reasons repotting it into a wooden box, like rejuvenating the roots, regaining the tree’s health, and working on the overgrown aerial roots and nebari.

Potted into a 24″ round ceramic pot, May 2015.

July, 2018. Ready for a repot but did not do it.

Why Use a Wooden Box?

To restore a bonsai’s health, it is a good idea to repot the tree into a slightly larger container, preferably in a terra cotta pot, a wooden box or a Styrofoam box.  A slightly larger container provides more soil volume and extra rooms for the roots to rejuvenate, increased surface areas between soil aggregates also allow the roots to breath better and grow more fibrous roots.  A cedar picket fence wooden box is an obvious choice since I cannot find a larger terra cotta pot or a big Styrofoam box. Although the latter can protect the roots from over heating during our intense summer heat, it is too glaring and stands out too much among the other trees, unless I could paint it.

As for weight, the 24″ ceramic pot weighed 32 lb., a comparable wooden box weighed about 5 lb.  I made a rough calculation, this round pot with tapered wall has a volume of about 1,100 cubic inches (about 18 L.), a square box holds almost twice the amount of soil.  Your tree will thank you for the extra room while in recovery.

Reworking Overgrown or Thickened roots

Aerial roots are great for improving the tree’s nebari, but they can become too big, crisscrossed or grew in unintended direction if one is not diligent in controlling and incorporating them to the intended design.

These two photos show how the skinny grafted aerial roots grew in 4 years without repotting in between:

Grafted aerial roots A, B and C in 2015 and 2019. Branch D was removed as it was sticking too much towards the front.

These grafted roots needed repositioning and incorporating into the nebari:

Repositioning thicker roots using aluminum wires and tourniquet.

Crossed roots repositioned, once fused, the top sections will be cut off.

Exposing More of the Nebari

Every time I repotted, I raised and exposed the nebari by about 1/2”. This time I raised it by about an inch. Exposing it gave the tree a larger nebari in each repot.

Root base raised by about an inch, shown by differences in tree bark colors.

Another advantage of using a wooden box is I could easily put in a few screws on the box to attach guy wires to bring down branches.

E.J.H Corner, a Ficus Authority and “My Father in His Suitcase”

I was searching online for ficus information, came across “FigWeb” and saw this reference:

Berg, C.C. & Corner, E.J.H. 2005. Moraceae – Ficus. Flora Malesiana Series I (Seed Plants) Volume 17/Part 2. National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Leiden.

Holy Moly! Was Corner still alive in 2005?  No, he passed in 1996.  The monograph was published posthumously.

As a ficus bonsai enthusiast, I think there are two botanists whose names are worth knowing beside Carolus Linnaeus the Younger who first described our ubiquitous Ficus microcarpa. These two botanists are:

C.C. Berg: He was the one who clarified the scientific name of Willow Leaf aka Narrow Leaf Ficus, described it in a paper with a very interesting title: “A New Species of Ficus (Moraceae) of Uncertain Provenance”. His description was based on container plants (bonsai, pre-bonsai??) from Florida, which became the type specimens. So Willow Leaf Ficus’ scientific name is officially Ficus salicaria; and salicaria means willow-like in Latin, a round about way of calling it a willow-like ficus. Many people still use the names F. nerifolia, F. salicifolia, but they are different species, not the one we grow in bonsai.

Cornelius (Kees) Christiaan Berg 1934-2012

My Ficus salicaria CC Berg shohin bonsai.

Two “Root-On-Wall” Ficus Penjing – How I Create This New Style

This article was written by Mr. Xuenian Han (韩学年), a well-known Lingnan penjing master. It was published in Mr. Shaohong Liu’s (刘少红) “The World of Penjing” (盆景世界), the most widely read online penjing magazine in China with over 135,000 subscribed readers. Both Mr. Han and Mr. Liu gave me permissions to translate this article and share it with English readers on how this new style was developed.

“The Fittest”, a “root-on-wall” ficus created by Mr. Xuenian Han. 韩学年作品《适者》（附壁榕）

Ficus microcarpa is a native tree species in the Lingnan region. As a fast growing tree and an ability to grow in a broad range of habitats, it is widely cultivated in urban and rural areas. In the Pearl River Delta, especially in villages and towns along the river, banyan trees with broad canopies provide shades and are popular with villagers, where they could gather and cool themselves during the hot summer days.

Ficus has large, powerful tree trunk and wide spreading, old gnarly roots. Since Lingnan penjing practitioners often model their trees based on close-range observations of how trees grow in nature, thus, the Banyan style was born. Ficus is a popular species for Lingnan penjing, whether the material is field grown or collected, key banyan features are artistically recreated and portrayed in a grow pot. There are many excellent examples of banyan style penjing.

Ficus growing on the old Nanfeng kiln wall in Foshan city, Guangdong. 佛山市“南风古灶”古榕

Ficus have aerial roots, when these roots touch and anchor themselves onto the ground the tree would continue to grow outwards, creating a forest-like image even though it is just a single tree; and this is the familiar banyan image.  Since ficus is a strong survivor and adapts to myriads of environments, there is another tree form from which these two “root-on-wall” penjing were based upon, and I will discuss how I created them.

An old ficus growing along a river in Shunde, Guandong. 本地（顺德）一河边古榕

Ficus Tree House Bonsai?

Huge tree roots clinging onto this ancient Ta Phrom Temple ruin in Cambodia is an iconic image.  They are not ficus, but silk-cotton, aka kapok, (Ceiba pentadra)  tree roots.

“Tomb Raider” was filmed at the Ta Phrom Temple. Waiting for Angelina Jolie to come out.

Strangler figs, Ficus tinctoria spp. gibbosa, (thank you Kasu Bonsai for correcting the subspecies name) do claim Ta Phrom, however, they look different with distinctive mesh-like aerial root networks.

Ficus grows rapidly in the tropic, it does not take very long for it to completely engulf an abandoned building.  Let me take you to the Anping Tree House in Tainan, Taiwan.  It was a warehouse built in 1867 by the Tait Company, a British trading company.  The Japanese later took over the building and used it for salt trading.  After the Second World War ended in 1945, the Taiwanese continued to use it for some years, and the building was abandoned.

Birds dropped some banyan seeds onto this abandoned building, in about 70-80 years, the old Tait Company warehouse became known as the Anping Tree House, completely engulfed by banyan tree trunks and aerial roots, transformed from an abandoned warehouse into a popular tourist attraction in less than 100 years!

Instead of razing down this condemned building, the city mayor had the foresight of building steel supports and stairs; it opened to the public in 2004 as a tourist attraction.

That’s my wife, Soon, in the red striped shirt.

One can now safely reach the roof top or the tree top, whichever you want to call it.  It offers some wonderful views of aerial root formations over different sections of the building.

Aerial roots grew parallel like carefully laid roof beams.  The corrugated roof probably served as a template for their growths.

This is not a typical big umbrella-like canopy, big trunk ficus we see in Taiwan.  Can some creative artists make a ficus tree house bonsai, please?

International Friendship Kusamono with Uwe Harwardt and Hermann Wallenhaupt

A post from my wife, Soon Cheah, a kusamono aficionado.

Our Facebook friend, Uwe Harwardt from Germany, sent us a selfie video showing how he made a kusamono pot from a lump of clay into a pot with surface cracks; at the end of the 20+ minute video he asked whether we like this pot or not, if so he would send it as our Christmas present.  We were delighted when it arrived in time for the 2017 Christmas.

Uwe and I have been Facebook friends for several years and we communicated often about kusamono.  Every time I received Uwe’s pot, I would put my heart into creating a kusamono that I felt we both would like and enjoy, and shared photos with him on the outcomes.

This is one of the early pots I received from Uwe.  I planted a false dandelion (Pyrrhopappus multicaulis), a common weed from our backyard in it, and asked our Houston Chinese Bonsai Society friend, Dr. Sun-Chueh Gao (高珊爵), to write a Chinese poem to accompany this kusamono.  My husband and I selected a verse from his poem, which we thought best summarized how one could even enjoy such a simple ubiquitous weed as long as it appealed to our hearts and souls, and pasted this verse on the photo like in a Chinese painting.

This is the translation:

I created a mixed planting with Uwe’s Christmas gift.  Uwe and I love mixed kusamono plantings that reflect something we see in nature, a blend of common flowers, grasses and weeds, as randomly and naturally as possible, yet encompassing the three basic elements of kusamono aesthetics representing the relative heights between heaven, earth and people, 天，地，人.

Our joint work exhibited at the 2019 American Bonsai Society Convention, ‘Bonsai on the Bayou” held in Houston, Texas. The clay scratching monkey is a gift from out Taiji class senior, Marcia Yang.  Photo taken by Shau Lin Hon of Slyworks Photography.

We submitted this joint effort to the April 2019 American Bonsai Society Convention, “Bonsai on the Bayou” held in Houston, Texas.  Our description of this entry is as follows: