Oddly shaped Portulacaria Afra. Chop or let it grow?

cbrshadow23

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I bought a couple P.Afra plants recently and one of them has some weird features. I'm wondering if I should just let it keep growing or give it a hard trim somewhere. I guess my main worry is that it's sending energy to weird places rather than thickening up the trunk. Here are some pictures. The tree is about 48" tall including the 12" tall pot.
Notice the main trunk is about 3" thick, but there are several big shoots that come out of the bottom. The previous owner did some strand trimming in the past, including removing lots of the lowest branches on the main trunk. What would you do with this plant?

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Forrestford

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Idk what’s your end goal. Your vision for this tree?
 

cbrshadow23

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This is the largest P.Afra I could find, so I'm hoping to thicken up the trunk and eventually apply some bonsai techniques. I feel like the trunk is currently too thin for an impressive bonsai, although I see examples online of P.Afra bonsai which are smaller/thinner than this one.
 

MrWunderful

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You could get like a kazillion cuttings off that.

Yeah thats what I would do to the bottom, chop it all up and start from scratch.

Or you could kind of train a large weird clump style? But It would have to be cut back hard to back bud.

Either way I would cut the top off, and you could get an informal upright but they are all going to be longer term projects.

Where did you get it from?
 

cbrshadow23

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Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I'm disappointed that I didn't look it over more closely before buying it. I do have another one from the same seller that isn't as weirdly shaped - I'll post that one sometime soon. MrWunderful, I drove all the way to Elk Grove to buy (2) similar sized plants. I almost certainly overpaid, but finding large P.Afra plants in the area is proving difficult. I found these on Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist.
 

Potawatomi13

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Remove tall straight trunk and smaller already chopped straight one and use for cuttings or sell new plants made from them. Use lower more interesting trunks to make multi trunk tree and remove the straight ones for more new plants. Sell small ones for $5 or so apiece and recover money spent;).
 

cbrshadow23

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I thought I'd post an update after the chop. I ended up getting lots of big cuttings that are now growing strong. The best part of "big ugly" above is probably the one in the picture below. It's now sprouting new leaves which is great. I'm thinking I'll chop it where the red line is. This will leave me with a thick trunk and a small branch that I'll keep as the new leader. The other option is to chop both existing branches off the main trunk and start from scratch. Thoughts?

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