Hi,

Our Chinese Banyan started to drop all its leaves and I'm desperate need for some advice because the more I try to research the more desperate and confused I get.

I bought my wife a Chines Banyan for her birthday about 6 weeks ago, along with a parrot flower power hoping that it would aid us in providing the plant with optimal care. So far it seems as if we are failing miserably and are experiencing one issue after an other.

After the second week of purchase we received the following 3 alerts on a daily basis.
- Water drainage insufficient
- Not enough sunlight
- Fertilizer level to high

On top of the alert we noticed a build up of mold on the soil surface.

Not being able to do much about the lack of sunlight in the winter, we tried to position the plant to the most sunniest spot in our apartment (note that direct sunlight is limited, especially during the winter).

My wife tried to removed the mold by scraping the soil and the soil has been flushed, but the high Fertilizer alert remained along with the high water level and lack of drainage.

Doing some research and asking our friends with green fingers brought us to the conclusion that the plant needed to get repotted. Reading about repotting learned us that the best time for that would be in spring/early-summer and seeing that the plant looked still very healthy (a lot of dark green leaves and only a couple dropping off and some with brown spots) we did hold off hoping we could make it till spring, but the situation worsened and the plant has been repotted last week.

Now 1 week later, our water drainage issue and high fertilizer level seems to be remediated but our ficus did lose about 60% of its foliage and its still dropping leaves. I know that the ficus gets easily stressed and that repotting did absolutely no good for its stress level, but I don't feel assured that this is the only reason for the ficus dropping its leaves so dramatically. The reason for this is because some of its leaves have brown spots, others turned completely brown and curled up but are sill attached to the tree where as other seem to be perfectly healthy, dark green, but are not being spared from falling off.

Reading up on possible causes pointed me to multiple reasons for the brown leaves, which includes overwatering. Looking at the watering history indeed confirms this as a possible cause, especially since we had the bad drainage problem, but this should have been resolved, instead more brown and black spots turn up and some of the leaves are completely brown and are curled up (which we didn't have before the repotting). The soil moisture level never dropped below 35% before repotting, we only did water the plant once in its initial week, and it's current water level is at 30%. I adviced my wife to hold back on watering until the soil moisture level drops to about 5-15%.

The plant is about 2 Feet tall with a twisted root and is located about 1 foot from the window and radiator, in a draft free zone. We are trying to give the plant as much sunlight as possible and are thinking about buying a plant lamp (seeing the lack of current sunlight). The roots looked OK (no root rot) and the pot seems to big enough to carry the plant for the next 2 years. The pot is a ceramic pot filled with regular indoor plant soil along with some rocks for better water drainage and some big holes at the bottom allowing excessive water to exit.

Being completely new to the complexity of reading plant signals, I feel a bit lost and I'm hoping some one can advise and point me to the correct direction for giving our plant the best path to recovery. Our current plan is to wait it out seeing that we don't know anything else that we can do except for adding a plant lamp.

Many thanks in advance for any insight and information.
Best Regards,
Semmy