Hi, One of the gardens I work at has a large (about 30ft high) Ficus rubiginosa australis which is dropping most of its leaves right now. It's supposed to be an evergreen tree, and nothing has changed in or around the tree, so...why is it dropping its leaves? (If it helps anyone, I live in South Portugal!) Cheers! TW
Did you have a temperature fluxuation? Ficus can be finicky about any changes. So if you haven't moved it, it doesn't need water, and you haven't done anything else to it, I would look into a change in temp. Maybe a draft or cold spell?
Just for clarification's sake, I assume in Algarve, Portugal that this is an outdoor plant growing in the garden, yes?
Yes, the tree is an outdoor plant. It's about 30ft high, with a canopy around 20ft wide. Don't know what that is in metres, sorry. We have some fairly serious temperature differences over the year, but they're normal. The only difference this winter was that we had a tremendous amount of rain, but this tree is extremely well established...I wouldn't like to guess its age.