Indoor Yucca is dying after cut/repot

Question

I bought a Yucca in fall 2018:

It was growing so big as I have plenty of sun and was so beautiful:

I google and read it was possible to split the plant, repot, cut the base as well so I did it as I want to make 2 plants, was growing to tall and heavy, taking so much room for the size of the place but unfortunately one of the plant is struggling.

The tall one I cut about 20cm of the root and repotted. The smaller one, just repotted. Both where struggling and foliage was too heavy for stems and flop over.

After a few weeks, the small came back straight up:

But the tall one is dying:

I cut it in November 2020, maybe not the best period as winter was there. I put sticks to keep the stem up for over a month to help the stems stay straight so it could maybe regained energy in the stem but it did not work. As you can see the stems are strong at the bottom but weak and with weird shape at the top. The top stems are so fine and soft that it can’t hold the foliage. I cut one stem to see if it will re-grow around it but I guess it is too early to tell.

I make sure not to over/under water, gave some fertilizer but still struggling.

The plant is alive and I want to save it even if it looks ugly right now. Anyone here to guide me on what to do next and how long it would take?

Answer 1

Yucca is easily propagated by cuttings, but there is a limit of how big the cutting can be. As I understand you correctly, you cut off the whole plant (with a lot of foliage) from its roots. The cutting (the whole plant) is too large. It takes time before new roots will appear, and in the meantime the foliage will die because of lack of water. You can try this with the bare stem (so without foliage), or try to take smaller cuttings (one cane with its foliage will work). For your large plant now, you may try to keep it alive by removing all the foliage, and let the plant make roots without the foliage. When that succeeds, new foliage will come after that. Good luck!