Late-season LST experiment

I see a lot of questions from people wondering how to shorten their plants once they've started to flower. You know, "It was all uber-stealth until it got 12 feet tall and all the grass around it flattened."

I top most plants using Uncle Ben's method
https://www.rollitup.org/advanced-marijuana-cultivation/151706-uncle-bens-topping-technique-get.html
and I've had times when the resulting four stems have split at the base. Usually I just pull it back together and it keeps on rolling. But what would happen if you just left it lying there? Would it recover? And could this be a solution for someone who's stuck with a monster plant in flower that needs to be trained severely?

This is an Early Durban, about 7ft, 3-4 weeks into flower. The stems were pulled away to the point where they separated at the base, and were left lying unsupported just above ground. I'll track the progress (or slow, painful death) and post pictures every few days.
Sorry if someone's already done this. And no, it's not actually LST, more like HST. But you get the idea.

I had that happen to a plant of mine and it turned out fine, but I wrapped some twist ties around it to hold it together (it was a lot smaller plant than yours) good luck!

That's why I'm doing this, to see if you really need to tie it back up. I'm pretty sure that even if you hadn't used the twist ties, it would have been fine. When it splits like that it seems to retain a satisfactory connection to the root system. I get the feeling that when we tie it back together, the plant doesn't really care, but it makes us feel better. Anyway, we'll see.

Thats probably true. I broke my stem putting the plant under a scrog screen and freaked out, thinking I lost the plant. Tying it together did make me feel better.

See, we did LST from the minute we put the girls outside. They're pretty bushy, but more like 3 feet (parallel to the ground vs. tall, I guess) long, and probably about 2 feet high. If something started sticking up too much, we just tied it down. We've got 3 girls and only 1 looks kind of wimpy. Good luck to all, no matter what, harvest time's a-comin' & I'm looking forward to some bud porn!

After 24 hours the 7ft plant is now about 3ft at its highest point. The plant doesn't seem otherwise distressed at this point. I'm not going to treat it any different from the other plants, just so it's a real-world test.

I'm just going to watch for dehydration, abnormal loss of foliage, hermies, extent of phototropism, flower development compared to a non-stressed sibling, that sort of thing. Oh, and death...I'll watch to see if it just dies.

Here we are at day 7. The plant actually appears as healthy as ever. No signs of stress. The second picture shows how all the foliage has completely re-oriented to follow the sun (this only took a day or two). I included a picture of the cracked stem, which is hosting ants that are lapping up the sap the plant produces as part of the healing process. I'm not surprised by the results so far, but I have an identical sibling right next to it that I'll use to compare at the end of the test. How it finishes flowering is really the critical question.

Unfortunately I couldn't lay the stems completely flat because of this plant is too close to several others. But you can see that laying it completely flat wouldn't add much more stress to the trunk, and someone who is using this experiment in the real world probably wouldn't need to lay the stems flat, they're probably only interested in reducing the profile of the plant from say 10ft to 3-4ft.

Am I missing anything? Does anyone have any suggestions to make this a better test?