Nice find. Looks like there are many branches coming out of the two pruning cuts near the top. May be there is another too in the back. If you leave them there then that point will thicken and create an unsightly bulge. So remove all but two - one to grow out and one to grow to side as a branch. Any major pruning (like severely cutting back) should be done in mid June when it is also a good time to repot.

Those are not trunks but aerial roots. In ficus this is considered desirable. It is hard to get them to do that unless you can provide very high humidity and warm conditions. You can read this excellent info on ficus by Jerry Meislik.

Thanks PK!

Regarding the "3 trunks," I meant the upward branching at the top. I figured out how to draw on these pictures - maybe that will help show what I mean. The red shows the branches, the blue shows cuts I'm considering. I'll call the branches 1, 2 & 3 from left to right. I want to cut branch 1 & 2 low, and remove 3. My intent is to keep branch 1 as a branch while it is currently competing with the main trunk. I want 2 to be the main trunk, but it is occluded by 3, which I am thinking of completely removing.

I've been working on removing places in which more than two branches originate. Each of the branches/trunks above have at least a trifurcation at the last pruning spot, but I was thinking of cutting each of those back significantly. It sounds like I should wait until June to do that type of aggressive pruning through.

Three thick branches up near the top does look odd. Those cutting points look OK to me. The middle one can be the new leader once it sprout some new branches. May be someone else can pipe in with ideas. Hopefully Al will see this thread and he is very good at advising on such things.

I would just clean up the trifurcations now and wait till next June to do some heavy pruning. I would let it store some energy for the winter and not remove too many leaves.

Awesome - thanks!

Al gave some brief advice about this tree on a different thread of mine (regarding my large jade).

• You can see that I removed about 90% of the trees top mass in the picture above. I can show you pictures of a half dozen more that had similar or even more severe treatment if you like. Point being, now is a good time to prune or repot, but not both and not for much longer - it's getting late for the Steeler's fans. Allowing the plant to continue to grow more leaves at the ends of branches is just going to make it harder to chase the foliage back (closer to the trunk).

  ..... no need to train the low branch further downward unless its current position is an optical illusion. If you prune that branch back to tiny branches so there are only a few leaves on the whole thing, you'll get back-budding back at least as far as the distal aerial root, which I assume you want to keep, and more likely all the way back to the trunk; then you train THOSE new branches that occur. If every leaf that is on the tree right now were to remain viable indefinitely, none would become a part of the composition. The branches that will make up the composition are yet to pop.

  Also, the top is already very heavy and hogging all the energy. If you don't prune/reduce it to remove the heaviness and to slow it down, you're going to get a LOT of dieback on lower branches because the tree is genetically committed to its top third unless you trump that by pruning. You need to reduce the top third significantly to strengthen the middle & bottom third of the plant before your only recourse is a chop and a do-over.

So he seems to be indicated at least a moderate prune of the top, but not sure if chopping major branches would be going too far. At this point, I removed a few small branches and cut off the growth tips.

Also, not sure if he is indicating that I should cut the growth tips on the lower branches to get back budding, or just let them grow.