I have a fairyland jade that suffered some rot damage and lost a lower branch a while back (maybe 6 months or a year ago, can't remember), and the trunk appears to have been completely girdled. Is this cosmetic damage, or is it slowly dying and I need to chop it off and try to re-root it? See closeup of trunk damage. The outer skin was a broken crust over some hollow space that broke away when I pressed on it, however onderneath that is quite solid brown woody surface with no sign of any remaining rot. I don't know if the outermost layer transports nutrients like treebark, or is just a dead external layer and everything is fine. The plant itself has a branch that seems to be slowly drooping more than it used to, but it's very gradual and I can't tell if that's just due to weight or not. The plant has never been exceptionally healthy and always been just "ok" and always seems a bit dehydrated (has been like that for 15 years), so it's hard to tell if it's performing ok or not. If that trunk damage is killing it I'd like to try to save it, but at the same time I don't want to be the cause of it's death by chopping off a perfectly good plant.
