Tag: woody

Safety first?

I was driving around town recently and saw a tree service crew clearing up some storm damaged trees. Because of my line of work I usually do a little rubber-necking and try to assess why type of tree came down and what issues may have preceded it’s demise. In this case, however, I was struck not by the trees but by the tree crew. What I saw left me speechless. Well, here, see for yourself…

 

No eye protection.  No hearing protection.  No sign of a hardhat, face-shield, or chaps by the chainsaw.  No personal protective equipment anywhere as near as I could tell.  Of course the photo illustrates a lot of what’s wrong with the landscape and tree service industry.   Economists tell us that this industry has a ‘low barrier to entry’; in other words any one with a chain saw and a pickup truck can put an ad in the classifieds and call themselves a tree service.   As a consumer, you may not care if the employer makes their employees where personal protective equipment (PPE).  But if they don’t care about their employees’ safety, what else don’t they care about?

 

Periodically I’ll write an article for a newspaper or other media on selecting an arborist.  I always make the point that you get what you pay for and urge consumers to compare bids and companies carefully.  Truly professional tree services have to cover the cost of hiring and retaining quality employees, worker training, proper equipment (including PPE), and insurance.  If you skip over those things, like Fly-by-night tree service here, it’s probably not too hard to come out with the low bid.

Trees: Dead or Alive

In light of the comments on Dr. Jeff’s latest post (When Trees Don’t Know They’re Dead), especially those by Shawn, Ed, and Dr. Linda, I absolutely have to post this.

To the best of my knowledge, the number of stand-up comedian bits related to tree health can be counted on one finger. Here it is, transcribed, as close as I can without having Linda ban me from the blog/WSU server.

Ron White is a big, bawdy, laid-back Texan, permanently armed with a cigar, glass of scotch, and high-beam smile.  I think he got thrown off the Blue Collar Comedy tour for not being red-necky enough. However, not recommended for the easily or moderately offendable.  Anyhoo, here goes, and it suffers without the drawl…

****
From Ron White’s You Can’t Fix Stupid recording
(verbatim, mostly):

I was having a fight with the landscape guy because, like, half the plants died…you know it cost tons of money and half the plants died. And the guy is fighting with me over whether or not a tree is alive or dead. Can you believe that bleep? We walk over to two trees, there’s not one leaf on either one of them except [you look toward the] timber [where the] the forest is a-blooooom.

I said “those two trees are dead right there.”

He goes over to one of the trees and scratches the trunk with his thumb and comes back and says this, and I quote: “The core of this tree… is still alive”.   [Long pause]

 

I said “Let me tell you what I’m looking for in a bleeping tree.”

[lotsa laffs]

 

I’m looking for tree that you can tell is alive even if you don’t know bleep about trees.

 

I don’t want to spend the next two years every time somebody comes over to our house “… oh no, those trees are fine right there – go scratch the trunk with your thumbnail.  You will find a vibrant core.  Just beneath the bark.”

******

Science Education and Lichens

Seemingly once a week we see a report in the news about how Science and Math education in the US lags behind many developed countries around the world.  http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-15/us/education.obrien.response_1_math-and-science-national-robotics-competition-education?_s=PM:US

While we typically think of Chemistry and Physics when discussing science education, biology is in there too.

 

I bring this up because I am continually amazed at how little many people know about basic biology.  Some of this funnels its way into extension calls and e-mails.  A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a distraught homeowner in a Detroit suburb.  “My maple trees are dying”, he told me sincerely.  “There are growths all over them.  They’re big trees.  What do I need to do to save them?”

 

I tried to get as much information as I could over the phone: How old are the trees? What kind of maple? Describe the site.  Describe the symptoms.  I told him the problem didn’t sound like typical issues with maples in our area (i.e., not manganese chlorosis, tar spot, gall mites, or verticillium wilt).  Diagnosing problems sight unseen is difficult so I asked if he could get me some digital photos.  “Yeah, my son has a digital camera.  We can do that.”  Later that week I got a series of digital photos like the one below.

Lichens on maple

I informed him the growths on the trees were lichens, a combination of a fungus and algae; they’re normal and they don’t harm trees.  I gave him a quick biology lesson on lichens and pointed out that some of the pictures he sent were of lichens growing on the sidewalk.  The algae part of the lichen is photosynthetic so they just need a place to hang out – a tree, a sidewalk or a piece of wood all work fine.

British soldier lichens

One of my all time favorite bumper stickers says, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”.  I suspect if this homeowner had happened to call an unscrupulous tree service instead of MSU Extension, they would have been more than happy to ‘treat’ the problem and sign him up for their deluxe 8-step pest and micro-nutrient maintenance plan.  Sometimes a little knowledge can go a long ways.

When Trees Don’t Know They’re Dead.

Last week a neighbor of mine called me up to ask how likely it was that their 4 year old (or so) crab apple tree was dead.  Sometime over the course of the winter cute fuzzy bunnies had decided that the tree’s bark was tasty and decided to eat it.  Naturally they ate it all the way around the circumference of the tree with the exception of a strip about an inch wide.  At this point you’re probably asking yourself why the neighbors suspected the tree might be alive.  The reason they were calling me was that the tree was leafing out–  so they figured that maybe the tree would make it — that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t as bad as it looked.  My answer — Sorry, the tree is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.  As a rule of thumb you can have up to a third of the circumference of a young tree girdled and the tree has a decent chance of growing out of it.  More than that and, though the tree might live for a few years, you’re dealing with so much damage to the vascular tissue that you’re just putting off the inevitable by not cutting it down.  A tree with as much damage as my neighbors tree had was just going through the motions.

When bark is eaten what is destroyed is the phloem — the tissue which carries the carbohydrates made by the leaves down the plant’s stem.  The cambium — which creates new phloem and xylem — is also destroyed.  But the xylem — the innermost tissue which transports water and nutrients up the stem — is left largely intact.  So girdled trees will flush out in the spring (using resources provided by the xylem), perhaps even two springs, but ultimately the tree will succumb.

But there is an up-side!  Girdled trees will be under a lot of stress.  Stressed trees tend to flower heavily — so enjoy the show first, then cut down the tree.

Harvesting an Experiment

This has been an exciting week for me.  On Monday we started cleaning off 72 rootballs of various tree species that had been planted 5 years ago for a study.  These trees had been planted in containers and become potbound at the nursery from which we received them.  We treated them in one of three ways.  Either we did nothing (in other words we just dropped the pot bound tree in a hole), we used the standard methods that Universities recommend for slicing potbound roots (Four deep slits down the sides and a deeply cut X across the bottom), or we cut off all of the circling roots by cutting the pot bound root system into a box shape.

A root ball cut into a box shape

The plan was to harvest after 4 years to see what happened – we decided to wait 5 – and boy did we see some interesting stuff.  At this point our results are preliminary – we need to run statistics before we can say anything conclusively – but this is what my eyes tell me.

  1. Trees that had their roots cut into boxes suffered reduced growth the first few years, BUT, their root systems look as good as any root systems that I’ve seen – almost no circling.
  2. We planted our trees with the surface of the soil at the same level as the surface of the media in the containers – which is too deep in most cases.  For trees with circling roots this created a severe problem as the circling roots often surrounded the stem – potentially causing suffocation of the tree later in life.
  3. Root systems that were cut using the 4 slit method didn’t look much different from those that weren’t cut at all.
  4. The number of large roots emanating from all of the treatments appeared to be about the same (we’ll need to run the stats before I commit to this one).  This is particularly interesting because many people expect large roots that are circling to continue circling — but that isn’t what usually happens (unless the hole where the tree is planted has hard sides which can force the roots to circle just like the container did).


This root system was from a control — no root pruning at all, but still plenty of large roots.

No matter what the results/statistics end up saying there will be more questions.  For example, all else being equal, how damaging are circling roots to the health of a tree if the tree is planted properly (no stem tissue under the surface of the soil) and the circling roots are under the surface of the soil?  If the answer is that circling roots under the surface of the soil aren’t very damaging (after all, there’s no stem tissue for them to crush) then why are we bothering to try to root-prune pot bound plants at all – what we should really be concentrating on is planting at the proper depth.

All the above is hypothetical though – I just enjoy thinking about this stuff as the data starts to roll in.  As we get more definitive answers and start to run the statistics I’ll let you know more.

Guest inquisitor reveals all

The odd oak in Friday’s photos is shin oak, or Quercus sinuata var. breviloba:

 

This trunk “puddle” is a really cool adaptation called a lignotuber (good job Matilija!) or burl.  These are common in woody plants found in wildfire zones.  New sprouts can arise after fires have roared through, or perhaps after heavy browsing by deer, as the park ranger suggested to Ginny, our guest inquisitor.

Thanks, Ginny, for sharing the photos and question.  If you have an interesting plant quiz topic, preferrably with pictures, feel free to pass it on for our Friday Question!

Friday quiz – guest inquisitor!

Reader Ginny Stibolt passed this one on to mull over the weekend:

“We stayed at the Llano River State Park in Texas where I spotted this weird growth pattern of a gnarly oak–it’s like a puddle of trunk from which the main trunk arises. The camp host, who seemed to be well informed, said that these were Spanish oaks in the white oak division and that a root disease causes the expansion of the base of the trees. About 1/4 of them, here in the camping area, have this malady and often new sprouts grow from the wide base. Spanish oak does not seem to be the “correct” common name, and in looking at the native oaks for Texas, I couldn’t readily identify it. So a mystery or two…”

 

So what kind of oak is this, and why does it have this weird trunk base?

Ginny has an update, and I’ll post it on Monday.

Looking for the lowdown on tree rings

Often we use our blog space as a soapbox from which to pontificate, but today I’m looking for some input from our loyal readers.  Last week I received a note from an editor looking for some words about tree rings.  We’re talking about landscape tree rings for planting annuals or perennials, not dendrochronology.

 

The editor was interested in specifics on tree rings for large existing trees such as what type of materials to use, what types of flowers or plants worked best, which trees can or can’t have tree rings, etc.  My reply was short, maybe even a little curt, “I don’t have any experience with tree rings but our general recommendation is to avoid grade changes around trees whenever possible. After I sent the reply I started thinking, is there any real harm to tree rings?  I’ve seen some that looked pretty nice (seen many that look like crap, too).  For most trees the amount of surface area covered is small compared to total surface root area.  If care is taken not to bury the root collar and trunk, would the tree notice covering a little bit of mostly structural roots?   Would appreciate thoughts (pro and con) from those with direct experience.

Wet trunk – the whole story

We had a flurry of discussion on this over the weekend. The diversity of possible answers shows you how difficult it is to do diagnosis with only some of the information available. That being said, several of you (Gail, Tom, Dave and Jimbo) all had portions of the problem identified. Here’s the whole picture:

As both trunks of this double-leadered tree have continued to expand in girth, they’ve created the perfect conditions for disease to occur in the narrow constriction between the trunks. Though I’m not a pathologist, I would agree with an initial diagnosis of slime flux.

In addition to the poor structure and disease issues, the location of this tree – next to a street, sidewalk, houses, and across the street from a school – simply shouts for removal before it inevitably fails and causes damage or injury.

Nice job – and thanks for doing your homework over the weekend!

Friday puzzle: wet trunk

Another diagnostic question today.  Below you can see the lower portion of a tree trunk whose left half is obviously wet:

What is directly causing the wetness (in other words, what environmental factor), and can you guess what led to this problem indirectly?

I’ll eliminate some of the obvious possibilities:  it’s not from dog pee, nor is it from a directional sprinkler.  And the answer to the second question is not in this close up photo, but will be revealed on Monday.

Why do I torment you like this?  Well, if nothing else, it gives you an idea of what distance diagnosis can be like – which is what we tend to do more and more, thanks to the internet and digital cameras.  Someone will send a photo of a plant problem and expect us to figure it out, but the answer may lie outside the field of view.

In any case, have fun!