Ficus houseplant advice

[BewareTheBeardedDragon]

I got a small ficus in the Ikea half price pre lockdown plant sale. It has loads of tiny stems which were all tied quite tightly together with a sturdy wire tie. I left it like that, but this evening I undid the tie because i noticed it was losing some leaves and they all looked very crowded which seems instinctively like it's a bad to have all the leaves squashed together? But I'm not very confident with houseplants so a bit clueless.

I think it could probably use a bigger pot, but I've read that it's best to do that in spring. It still looks healthy, but just wondering if releasing the tie was right, and also if it has too many stems and maybe I should split it when I come to repot it?

I wondered whether the tying together was to make a sort of compound trunk, rather in the same way as you sometimes see plants with trunks plaited out of several smaller stems.

It won't have hurt it to undo it. Any training of plants consists basically of constraining it to grow ina way which it wouldn't do naturally.

As to whether you split it - try and shake and teasle it apart until you can see whether it's a single multistemmed plant, or lots of smaller plants which have all been plandted closer together , and base your decision on that.

Yes - you are right. I have done some Googling and found that ficus is one of the species of trees that does inosculation - which is the stems/trunks fusing when they are kept tightly bound together.

But I still think that the leaves were too crowded because it's only short at the moment, so I'm leaving it unbound for now, and when it's put on a bit of height I will tie them up or plait them or something. That's if I don't kill it first... ☠️