Hi,

At first I have to tall you that if you are patient enough within time you will see side growth but it is always very slow. For speeding the things up with anubias species you may take following actions:

1. You may prevent its rhisome growth continue on a straight pattern. For this you tie the growing tip with a fishing line and force the rhisome to the side you want and the other end of the line to a rock, wood, tube... to keep the rhisome that way. You have to repeat it by making small bends every week and in app a month time you will have a growth to any direction you wish. You have to make the bendings gradualy if you don't want to break the rhisome. This works very nice on the anubias firmly attached to a wood or rock other than substrat attached ones. With this method I have circular rhisomes which looks very bushy in the end.

2. For bushy growth you can attach two seperate anubias on one another, cross or plus shaped or parallel but with growth tips on different directions.

3. You may cut out older leaves to promote new leaf and rhisome growth and this is really very effective in short terms. This way you will always have clean and healthy anubias.

4. Last but not least you may make tiny cuttings on the rhisome which I have explained in some other posts. In this procedure main idea is to make cracks on the rhisome not longer than 1cm and with a depth of 1-2mm. Further cracks may cause rhisome to break into two. You have to make this cracks on the places you want a side rhisome growth and much suitable areas are the places with lesser or no leaves with a bare rhisome length of around 2-3 cm. In a month or a bit more you will see new rhisome growth from the crack you have made and the former growing tip will not be affected with this process.

Anubias is a plant which requires absolute patience, so whichever method you try you have to wait longer terms than the growth time of any other plant. If you hesitate to apply any of these methods you may choose to wait longer terms as these plants will also make the same things by itself within time.

YILDIRIM

 

Allright thank you for the detailed information. You couldn't have explained it better.

 

Another observation that has been made with Anubias is that they have smaller leaves when they are attached to rocks and woods and larger leaves when planted directly into the substrate.

Personally I like to tie mine to lava rocks so they can be easily moved around in the aquascape. Once you have enough they will eventually grow into each other and form a nice cluster of Anubias.