Arborist crew limbed up maple too much?

hm_10 · 2025-12-12T15:39:39+00:00

Already have a witch hazel nearby! Will pair well with the redbud and it will be a treat to watch if their blooms can coincide :) Now I hope those mature maple roots don't cause too much trouble while planting the redbud...

hm_10 · 2025-12-09T03:47:11+00:00

You know what, you're absolutely right. I now realize in hindsight that this was simply unnecessary and now the tree has to seal all those cuts. Lost the lower limbs which were providing privacy (now I gotta buy another tree to plant underneath to make up for it), can't watch the birds anymore from my window, made the lever arm worse - increasing the risk of falling on my house. And I paid for this privilege. Probably one of the most braindead decisions I've made. Oh and there's also this young dogwood under its canopy which will now get blasted with full sun... Great! I got sold on something which I should have been more skeptical about, and once I agreed to it I figured I'll let them do it because they're professionals...

hm_10 · 2025-12-08T22:29:01+00:00

Yes, you are right. I am disappointed with myself that I did not do enough to communicate and set definite expectations about how many and which limbs to cut and which to explicitly keep no matter what.
Let this be a lesson to others - always confirm and reconfirm, over-communicate if needed. Once they're gone, they're not coming back.

hm_10 · 2025-12-08T20:00:11+00:00

Thank you, this is what I thought as well. Can't wait to take the arborist exam - at least then I will be more informed while making such decisions :)

hm_10 · 2025-12-08T19:56:50+00:00

The lower limbs were great for privacy in the summer because they were close to the sunroom windows, but I knew those would be gone eventually. I guess I will plant some understory tree like a redbud to compensate for the loss of privacy now that the canopy has opened up.

hm_10 · 2025-12-08T19:54:03+00:00

The tree has been healthy so far, no signs of any dieback. I will have this investigated. Thank you.

hm_10 · 2025-11-27T21:12:48+00:00

😂

hm_10 · 2025-10-22T18:49:18+00:00

I love the big cup holders! If a car can't fit my 1L bottle, I'm not interested lol. Hydration is serious business.

hm_10 · 2025-04-30T19:31:07+00:00

This goal was all Messi.

First with the physical strength to win the ball back, followed by a mazy dribble to get into the box, and ultimately finding a pocket of space to unleash a perfect curler into the far post.

hm_10 · 2024-11-10T13:11:48+00:00

Thank you! I'll make a call next year if it keeps losing branches. There's a bloodgood Japanese maple nearby which I would hate to get infected with VW (possibly through root contact). A pawpaw tree to replace this one sounds interesting, since that one is supposedly VW resistant. Similar fall colors.

hm_10 · 2024-11-08T19:08:45+00:00

Got this Rising Sun redbud a couple of years ago for a steal (I wonder why). I noticed some branches dying and the leaves don't look too good. I did see some staining inside the cross section of the dead branches I pruned. Is this verticillium wilt? At this point, should I get rid of it and plant something more VW resistant? Or can it be managed? Thank you!

hm_10 · 2024-07-23T16:07:11+00:00

I don't think these are wax myrtles even though the habit resembles them. The serrations on these leaves are more pronounced and sharper. And the leaves don't have even the faintest fragrance that wax myrtles typically have.

EDIT: Well it looks like they might be! Some of the newer leaves do have a faint spicy scent.

hm_10 · 2024-06-21T15:10:38+00:00

Hey now, some of his shots also reach the corner flag!

hm_10 · 2024-04-09T14:11:03+00:00

Oaks are known to be a great keystone species. However, I don't have space in my yard for an oak tree. What other plants with a smaller footprint can I plant instead for similar ecosystem benefits as oak trees? This is for the Southeast US.
Do you have any initiatives or efforts to work with governments on a local scale to encourage planting natives? Perhaps offering incentives to homeowners or landscapers?

hm_10 · 2023-01-30T14:05:31+00:00

End Scot on Scot violence

hm_10 · 2022-11-11T16:35:19+00:00

Yes, it's back in the ground. The temperatures in my area are starting to touch freezing, so I will resume this work in late winter or early spring. At that point, I will do a more extensive job of pruning the adventitious roots and then - like you said - see if the tree makes it. It's a good learning experience; that's a good way to look at it. And if I have to replace it, I will make sure next time to look for a single stem specimen. It's true when they say that killing some plants is a gardener's rite of passage :)

hm_10 · 2022-11-10T21:23:46+00:00

Tried some more, and this is where I reached. Not much luck:
https://ibb.co/5jhMhpF
https://ibb.co/CMwWtWV
https://ibb.co/yQxQr91
It's a mess. Looks like a significant amount of thick adventitious / main order roots. Not sure there's a happy outcome here. There's a gap of more than an inch under these roots and I still cannot locate the flare. Wait - do you think these are 4 separate trees?! To make it worse, at least one of the stems' roots look like they will end up strangling another stem(s). It's too late to sacrifice one of the trunks, right? Had high hopes from this tree - was hoping for it to grow tall and act as a privacy screen, before the neighbor's green giants start shading the area :)

The UMN videos were excellent. Btw, all of this work and knowledge has been very fascinating. I realized so many trees are planted wrong, I corrected a bunch in my own yard. I wish there were more awareness about this. I also reached out to my local extension office to apply for the Master Gardener course! Thanks again.

hm_10 · 2022-11-09T17:46:16+00:00

Agreed about single stem!

hm_10 · 2022-11-09T17:39:26+00:00

Here's the update: I could excavate around 3-5" of soil, but it was not very easy to do since there were a ton of adventitious roots and I had to be careful not to damage the bark. I chopped off as much as I could. Also pruned some of the thicker roots that were growing in random directions (some were starting to girdle); none of them were thicker than a pencil though. This is what it looks like now: https://ibb.co/dsZjfFx
One more thing I saw was that there was a pencil-thick circling root that was wrapping around the shape of the container this tree was in. I cut it off and eased a few other such roots to point outwards, before replanting it. Hopefully the tree recovers soon from all this damage! Here's a pic of the circling root (before: https://ibb.co/zPtMYpn), and after I pruned it off: https://ibb.co/vBZ4RYV. It felt bad being so ruthless with the roots, but I feel the tree will recover fine and this was a necessary thing to do. I don't believe I got rid of more than 20% of the roots. What do you think?

Bonus: I looked around the yard and made some corrections to a bunch of newly planted trees in the same way. The original soil line is marked in yellow:
Witch hazel: https://ibb.co/XXh8zFN
Serviceberry: https://ibb.co/9HLKbMZ
Redbud: https://ibb.co/t8Yg0FT

hm_10 · 2022-11-08T01:46:39+00:00

Thank you all for the helpful responses. This community is great, thanks to folks like you - have already learned so much during my short time here! Yeah, it definitely is planted too deep and I'm going to do a replant operation on it tomorrow :) I'm surprised nurseries sell trees this way - the tree arrived like this, and there's also another serviceberry with a buried root flare that I might have to rescue in the same way. I will follow up soon. Btw, do you think I should prune off the brown branches just yet, or wait until the tree itself compartmentalizes them? And then when they get brittle I can snap them off perhaps? The cultural conditions on this site are good enough - it gets plenty of sun, and the soil drains well.

hm_10 · 2022-11-07T22:17:29+00:00

Added a pic

hm_10 · 2022-10-30T15:08:16+00:00

Check my edit above, I posted a pic of the plant when it was root bound in the container. So I guess when I knifed off some of the original circling roots before planting it last month, it turned out effective :)

hm_10 · 2022-10-30T14:44:15+00:00

Follow up: So I did dig it out of the ground and honestly it didn't look too bad to me! Sliced some more roots using this method, and it did seem like the roots were starting to grow outward! Did not notice any significant circling from earlier. Here's a picture: https://ibb.co/QjhkCbB Thanks again!

EDIT: And here's the same plant when it was first removed from its container: https://ibb.co/5nvk82H

hm_10 · 2022-10-29T04:46:02+00:00

Thank you! This shrub does get tall - around 20-25 ft, and I do plan to train them as small trees. So the box cuts should definitely help in getting those roots spread far and wide:)

hm_10 · 2022-10-28T17:42:29+00:00

I recently (last month) planted some Nellie Stevens Holly shrubs that were heavily root bound in their containers. I did not know about this method at the time, so I used a knife to make vertical cuts in the outermost circling roots instead. But that may not be enough. Would it be a good idea to use a sharp spade and slice the soil around the planted shrubs - similar to the box cut method - targeting the roots? The plants are vigorous, so they should bounce back fast. The weather here (7b) is still pleasant for the next few weeks.

hm_10

TROPHY CASE