Tell me how I've killed my Prostrata Juniper

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I think I watered this thing to death, and I'm curious to know if you agree with me or if you think there might be another reason for its decline and impending demise.

A little backstory - this is a Prostrata Juniper, it's an air layer that i started in Aug '21 and separated in mid November. As you can see in the following pics, it's not looking good at all. Over the past couple weeks, the foliage has been fading to a very dull, greyish green, and just yesterday I noticed that a few of the branch tips have fully died and gone brown. Here's a few pics to demonstrate -

220930 Prostrata Air Layer 1.jpg

220930 Prostrata Air Layer 2.jpg

220930 Prostrata Air Layer 6.jpg

In that third pic above, the foliage on the right is from the subject tree, while the healthy foliage on the left is from the mother tree. I did a scratch test to see if it's still alive, and while it's thin, there's definitely some healthy cambium. When I pulled the tree out of the pot, however, the roots don't look good at all.

220930 Prostrata Air Layer 10.jpg

220930 Prostrata Air Layer 3.jpg

I haven't watered this tree in three days, and it's been pretty hot during the day. The rootball is soaking wet and most of the roots feel pretty squishy. I teased apart the rootball and it was just soaked all the way through. The substrate I used was coco coir and perlite at approximately a 50/50 ratio, and in retrospect I wish I had used something much less water rententive. I think my rationale at the time was that I used that 50/50 mix as the air layer medium, so I wanted to keep it the same in a growout pot. Anyways, I got rid of most of the rest of the soil and I'm going to put it into some pure pumice to see if I can't get it to resurrect itself.

220930 Prostrata Air Layer 12.jpg

220930 Prostrata Air Layer 13.jpg

So based on the mix I used to pot it in, and the fact that the rootball is so soaking wet and the roots look like they've rotted away, I think that I overwatered this thing and killed it. But before it died, it grew a LOT of roots - the air layer rootball was maybe only 1/4 of the total volume of the pot, and as you can see from the pic above the tree filled the pot over the course of one season. Which makes me wonder if something else went wrong to cause the tree to stop using water, which would have then led to root rot even with what I had thought was appropriate watering. Until the last couple of weeks, it'd been growing like a champ all season - clearly it filled the pot with roots, and it's got healthy 2-3 inch extensions all over the tree.

Does anyone suspect that this might be anything other than overwatering? I'd like to know what others think.
 

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LuZiKui

Shohin
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Yeah it does seem very, very wet. If you haven't watered in 3 days and it's still that wet, that could definitely be a reason for the decline. What's the container look like that you had it in? It just seems crazy that it would stay that wet for that long when we're still getting 80s-90s out here every day.

I'm wondering if in the heat wave we had a little while back it went dormant and you kept watering it the same amount?
 

nuttiest

Omono
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Look at your layer stem, it was never cut off and a section of dead wood left on. The layered stem needs to eventually make callus to cover the whole bottom of layered stem, much like a trunk needs to callus over a chop. With deadwood there, not going to happen.
 
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