rubber plant is dying

Hi,
I have beautiful rubber plant which is around 4 ft tall and was growing very nicely. I changed its soil ..put new potting soil and after that its leaves started turning yellow and stared falling off...more than half the leaves are gone ..please suggest what went wrong ..how can I revive it.

Gosh, that is so unusual for a rubber tree. I grow lots of them and re-pot/take cuttings all the time. I have never seen the leaves turn yellow/brown or drop. These plants are tough. I can grow them under-potted (root bound) and over-potted, with lots of soil space, and the plants just go right on thriving.

Just be sure your soil is well-draining, that the pot is not sitting in a saucer full of water, that the plant is not subjected to cold or a strong cool draft, and that there is fairly good indirect light. The soil should remain barely moist but not sopping wet, but mine shrug of even periods of dryness. That's all these plants need to flourish, though getting them outside in the spring/summer (under shade of course) gives them a big boost.

Ken

I wish you would have asked about the repot before undertaking it. I'm not saying that to chide you - just that we could have advised you that repotting a plant about to enter a period of quiescence (very slow growth - the plant sort of resting until days get longer) shouldn't be repotted. The act of repotting is a very good thing for rootbound Ficus, just that the timing was off. The entire Ficus genus, except for the hardy fig F carica) should be repotted in the summer. The best time is the month before its most robust growth, which would be around Father's day, for you. If you weren't careful about keeping all the roots wet during the repot, you probably lost a large fraction of the important fine roots to desiccation, which is a significant setback.

If you take the plant's natural rhythms into account and repot in summer when the plant is at peak vitality, the plant will tolerate bare-rooting very well. I've bare-rooted Ficus so large it took 2 good men to tip the pot over - probably 100 gallons + of soil, removing more than 3/4 of the roots, half the top growth, repotting into a pot half the size of the original ... and the plant resumed growth within 2 weeks and acted like nothing happened.

What you DO have going for you is, you said the plant was growing well. Assuming the plant was healthy, it should recover, given time. The key is to keep the soil warm and the soil damp - DAMP being the operative word. With leaves falling, the plant will use very little water. It's likely that even those leaves that haven't fallen are forming an abscission layer at the base of the petiole (leaf stem) and will fall soon, which means even they are not using water. Your main job at this point is to make sure you never let the soil get soggy, and wait. No fertilizer is required until you see sure signs of new growth.

If you like, I can post an article I wrote about caring for Ficus in containers. It has a lot of useful information.

Al