Ficus Benjamina Botanical Illustrations and Elementary's Stunted Tree

Summary: Elementary series episode Paint It Black May 1, 2014, reveals a reclusive clue under reduced growth contrary to Ficus benjamina botanical illustrations.

Potted Ficus benjamina in indoor setting; Sarasota, Florida; Saturday, Nov. 8, 2003: Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0 Unported, via Wikimedia Commons

One Ficus benjamina assumes an accelerated growth habit in Ficus benjamina botanical illustrations and in the Columbia Broadcasting System series episode Paint It Black May 1, 2014, even though another appears stunted.

Director Lucy Liu and writers Robert Doherty and Bob Goodman bury a game console, clue to two murders, in a container for a stunted Ficus benjamina. Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) comments, "It's a Ficus benjamina. Popular choice in decorative office greenery," to Mycroft's (Rhys Ihfan), "You keep looking at that plant." He describes, "Thrives even when neglected. The Ficus is an aggressive grower; it'll strain the limits of any container. But this one. This one seems stunted."

The episode errs in enclosing Ficus benjamina in a small pot, not a container the equivalent of two to three times the evergreen's extensive sidewise-spreading roots.

The Moraceae family relative of breadfruit, mulberry, osage orange and pineapple flourishes natively in Australia and Asia, where it functions as official tree of Bangkok, Thailand.

Ficus benjamina gets the literal English equivalent Benjamin fig and goes by Ficus tree and, because of the graceful droop of its brown-gray-white-barked branches, weeping fig. The woody plant and its variegated cultivar Starlight hold the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit and its Too Little cultivar helps indoor bonsai gardens. The clipped screen, indoor ornamental, natural hedge and urban landscape tree identified in 1767 by Carl Linnaeus (May 23, 1707-Jan. 10, 1778) is cold- and draft-intolerant.

Elementary's jeopardized second-season office ornamental juggles the jaunty canopy, jostled foliage, judicious, 19.68-inch (50-centimeter), smooth, straight-up stem and jumbled root ball in Ficus benjamina botanical illustrations.

Ficus benjamina knows indoor 10-foot (3.05-meter) and outdoor 100-foot (30.48-meter) heights in humid temperature ranges between 65 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit (18.33 to 23.88 degrees Celsius).

Ficus benjamina likes distilled and filtered water without the chlorine, fluoride and salts in tap water, when the topmost 2-inch (5.08-centimeter) soil layer looks somewhat dry. Daily mixes of 5 to 7 hours in bright sun and of partial shade make the end-tipped, oval, 2.36- to 5.12-inch (6- to 13-centimeter) leaves glossy. Ficus benjamina needs aerated, nutrient-rich, well-drained soils that nevertheless nurture horizontal, upward-heaving roots that, like Aceraceae maple tree family members, vertically nudge flooring, ground and pavement.

Ficus benjamina botanical illustrations offer optimal observations of branches, as asexual vegetative propagators, and of seeds, as natural, sexual propagators of indoor and outdoor ornamental landscapes.

Ficus benjamina propagates natively and naturally by seeds passed for soil-sowing by orange-bellied, ornate, pink-spotted, superb and wompoo fruit doves and purple-tailed and Torresian imperial pigeons.

Clipped branches in water one week and in coarse sand, peat moss and perlite two to four weeks queue up rooted Ficus benjamina by vegetative propagation. Asexual and sexual propagation results in a pathogen-, pest-, problem-unfriendly woody plant that requires paltry pruning other than for damaged, dangerous, dead, decaying and diseased parts. Both sustain a phytoremediator that subtracts formaldehyde, toluene and xylene gases from indoor air even as it seeps latex sap and supports allergic asthma and rhinoconjunctivitis.

Ficus benjamina botanical illustrations and scientific texts tell biological and ecological truths that Elementary's second-season tipster tree treats through above-ground troubles that track to below-ground trauma.

In Paint It Black (Elementary tv series season 2 episode 22), Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) discovers one of several Ficus benjamina plants in the office of missing Credit Versoix vice president Pierce Norman is stunted because it serves as a hiding place for a clue, a handheld game console; Norman's head of security, Kurt Yoder (Michael Gaston), watches, with a healthy Ficus benjamina to his right: NonstopShows @NonStopShows, via Twitter May 1, 2014

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Potted Ficus benjamina in indoor setting; Sarasota, Florida; Saturday, Nov. 8, 2003: Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0 Unported, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Starr_031108-0243_Ficus_benjamina.jpg; Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY 4.0 International, via Starr Environmental @ http://www.starrenvironmental.com/images/image/?q=24047861113; Forest and Kim Starr (Starr Environmental), CC BY 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/starr-environmental/24047861113/

In Paint It Black (Elementary tv series season 2 episode 22), Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) discovers one of several Ficus benjamina plants in the office of missing Credit Versoix vice president Pierce Norman is stunted because it serves as a hiding place for a clue, a handheld game console; Norman's head of security, Kurt Yoder (Michael Gaston), watches, with a healthy Ficus benjamina to his right: NonstopShows @NonStopShows, via Twitter May 1, 2014, @ https://twitter.com/NonStopShows/status/462112022705242112

For further information:

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. London England: George Newsnes Ltd., 1892.
Available via Project Gutenberg @ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1661?msg=welcome_stranger

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"Paint It Black." Elementary: The Third Season. Los Angeles CA: Paramount Pictures Corporation, May 1, 2014.