You need to snip it off below the rot. Use a pruning shears and cut about an inch below the rot. The healthy tissue should be whitish and firm. If there are brown or gray patches in the cut, snip again about a half-inch down and keep going until you hit completely healthy tissue. You don't need to cover the cut, just let it air dry and it will callous over naturally. After a few weeks you will probably get new branches sprouting from just below the cut.

I question why it would rot from the top down?

It started at the top...what other way could it go?

I like to cut pachys with a razor sharp sterile fillet knife. Leaves a clean wound that heals quickly.

randy

The tissue at the top of the plant is younger and softer. That may be why the rot started there.

If you make a cut and discover more rotten tissue, make sure that you sterilize your blade before making another cut. If you don't you risk transferring the infection to the healthy tissue.

I too have a 6+ foot pachy with 3 trunks & am wondering what caused yours to rot in the first place - anybody? I also have 4 baby pachys, two with a different problem: new leaves started to appear only to then turn black, I've been looking around GW for 'black mold' info & haven't seen it anywhere in this forum, a few weeks ago I did spray the two with a very dilute clorine bleach solution, will this help? And lastly one more question: the big pachy has a "keike" or baby shooting off near the base of the main trunk, has lots of healthy new leaves & is about 8" long. Should I leave it alone or I try to cut it off & plant it the keike? Thanks!
~ irbnate

Help! I have loved and cherished my Palms and this year we had a very bad cold front that moved in and they are on a covered patio. They got frost bite and lost all the leaves. Now what do I do? The tips of 2 of them look dried, but the rest of the stocks seem ok. What do I do? Should I cut off the tops or leave it alone
The size of the two are 36 inches. Help!

Our 5' single-trunk Madagascar Palm in a large pot on the patio evidently sustained freeze damage to its growing tip during the big freeze in Phoenix in January. The top few inches are now mushy, rest of trunk seems solid. After reading the posts here, I plan to slice off the top and see what happens. Based on other comments here, I feel confident in trying this; might even result in a better-looking plant in the long run if it sprouts branches.

I had a 2 ft tall specimen with about 5 stems on top, most of the stem tips got frost-bite last fall and turned black, but in the last few weeks, there are multiple new growing points emerging from the "tubercles" along the periphery of dead tissue, so it seems like if you want your Pachypodium to branch, give it some light frost, and you may be rewarded with many new stems!

Thanks for the previous posts everyone.
It's quite disheartening to see a mature plant have similar problems, but helpful to have so many concerned about the same problem.
My plant is about 15 years old and has been in my garden for 8 or 9. We had a golf ball sized hail storm come through Fort Lauderdale a month ago and the the rainy season set in. I hadn't noticed, but one of the many smaller top branches was rotten and collapsed. So I used copper sulfate to clean a knife and cut away the rotten branch below the area and figured it was the end of the problem. Three weeks later I discovered more of the same and cut away about 6 areas, all top branches. I think the hail actually injured the branches. I sprayed the entire plant with copper sulfate. 3oz to a gallon of water, and the soil around the plant with more of the same. Don't follow this procedure until I confirm the results.
If this works, I will post the results.
Thanks,
Dale

I have ten ft madagascar and it was damaged when it was put back outside it has 3 stems or trunks one of them was broken over about 8 inches and also has a gash closer to the bottom the whole plant looks vCard sickly it's been outside for 2 weeks and still doesn't have a still not a hint of a leaf?