Specialty Gardening: Chopping off a braided Ficus tree, 1 by tapla

tapla wrote:
Trees don't suck up anaerobic bacteria, but the anaerobic conditions inherent in soggy soils do kill roots, which commonly causes trees to die of thirst, even in a sea of plenty.

You'd be charged with the responsibility of getting your tree into a highly aerated soil to promote healthy root growth/function/metabolism as the key to getting the tree back to a place where it has the energy reserves to withstand any kind of significant work, and a trunk chop is VERY significant work.

If things are as bad as you make them sound, it seems like an emergency repot, which includes bare-rooting the plant and pruning all roots back to viable tissue and getting the tree into a suitable soil is job 1. Getting the soil right is KEY. I can't emphasize enough, how important your choice of soil is to the o/a well-being of any conventional planting, and especially to plants in shallow containers like bonsai.

For a better understanding: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1073399/

Al