Sick Wellingtonia

[Milly]

Hi all,

 

As you know I am not a forester nor a tree surgeon but I do however own a forest thus have a vested interest in trees and we have some beautiful old trees in the gardens.

Now to my question we have a number of Wellingtonia trees and very large cedars. One of the Wellingtonia is in poor health there are two next to each other the biggest is tall and healthy.

The bark has been stripped back 3 feet from the ground up, I believe by animals in the past it also has had ivy strangling it now cut back.

The issue is one side of the tree is in good condition the other side is dead any suggestions of what could be wrong or how I can help the tree.

 

This picture is of both trees the smaller one is in poor health.

 

This one shows the stripped bark ;-(

 

 

This one shows the unhealthy side.

 

[Marc]

dont rule out the dry weather we have experienced for a long time now, a decade in fact.

 

milly, get a nice mulch layer around all your trees as much as yo can practicaly do, start with the best most prized trees that look a bit sparse and work your way round to them all.

 

This will help retain moisture in the soil and increase the biodiversity of the soil fauna, competing and preying upon the mycelium of parasitic armillarias etc

 

I'm a real fan of this type of treatment, we used to look after the grounds of a college near here which was once a grand house with impressive landscaped gardens home to many great Cedars, Oaks and Beech everything was muclhed around 10+ years ago with mulch circles extending to at least the drip zone, at first removing the formal lawn under the trees was not liked but given time it now looks great and most do not realise that it was once lawn right upto the trunks.

I'm sceptical about Mycor treatments and fertalising.

 

On your site Milly the grass and years of animal grazing compressing the root plates and damaging the base of trees has not helped matters reducing the trees vigour and hindering their chance at keeping pathogens at bay.