So my grandmother was Irish and she had this green thumb that I would kill for. when I was young she had inspired me to grow a wisteria as large as the one in her majestic garden. She gave me a 6" potted wisteria for my twelfth birthday, which sadly died from a most painful fertilizer overdose.

That was just the beginning of this long and unsolved mystery surrounding the unintentional mass murder of anything green under my roof.

So I am here now on your forum, posting a call for help. I have a Pachira aquatica or "money tree" that I purchased at IKEA in Emeryville almost a year ago. I left it in the car on the back seat on a hot California summer day while I had lunch with my girlfriend.

For the record, I've killed a lot of plants. But I've never almost killed a new plant within an hour of buying it. When I returned to the car it was fried. Any leaf touching the glass had turned brown. I immediately felt a bad omen. "Why did you buy a money tree?", I asked myself, with no suitable response.

I transplant it into this pot from ikea that has a gauge for overwatering (who would overwater a plant that much for the gauge to even move??) and take it to my office where I can nurture it back to health. I was able to save two of the three stalks and the new growth came strong and the tree was how it should be.

Then the leaves started to curl.

I stopped watering for 3 weeks to try and stave off root rot. This didn't seem to help. I transplanted and washed off all the dirt and broke off any roots that appeared limp or felt slimey. This didn't leave many...

The new soul was a mixture of 60% homemade compost, 40% sand. I had no idea how heavy I was making this pot. What would I have done without wheels? I pushed the soil/sand away from the trunk of the plant and filled this in with a mixture of wood chips and sand to try to keep residual moisture away from the trunk. i know I wasn't using the right ingredients for this project but it was on a Sunday night and I'm not sure it would have endured another week.

I lightly watered it the day of repotting but haven't watered it since. Now it's been 5 weeks or so and you can see new growth in the attached images, but you will also notice the leaves are pale and twisted.

I'm not sure there is anything i can do to save my plant, but if anyone has any suggestions I would sure appreciate it. Many thanks in advance for the help!

J