Trees both a blessing and nuisance

Trees can be a blessing and a nuisance dependent on where they are and the benefits they provide. They are a wonderful source of shade for us and animals but in winter they are the cause of dampness unless they are deciduous.

When deciduous trees lose their leaves, it’s great for some people because they can make leaf mould for their gardens. For others, fallen leaves are a menace, blocking drains and a chore to rake up.

Some types of trees planted too near to buildings or concrete pathways cause damage over time with their roots as they grow and age.

Never underestimate the power of plant growth whether it is roots or foliage.

Last season a tomato plant growing in one of my glasshouses was able to squeeze a shoot between a pane of glass and the frame poking itself outside of the house. As this tender shoot grew it placed pressure on the glass until the glass cracked. Remarkable and annoying.

Trees can be annoying, particularly if they were badly positioned when planted, blocking views, damaging paths and a danger in wet times with high winds.

When the soil becomes really wet, plants lose their root grip or their root anchors. Trees have the same problem — their roots can’t grip the wet soil, making them more vulnerable to falling over in strong winds. In dry soil times, very strong winds are more likely to break trees.

It is prudent to open up trees that could be a danger to allow wind to more easily pass through them.

The first lesson in pruning trees (and other plants) is that if you cut the end off a branch it will cause dormant buds before the cut to form new branches.

We use this to advantage with new trees, in particular ones we call rods (a grafted tree that has little or no side branches when you buy it).

With rods we cut a few centimetres off the top, causing new branches to grow off the rod. Lower branches are removed if desired. The new branches that form may also need to have the ends cut off to make the tree more bushy.

If we want to open up a tree to allow more wind and light to pass, then we need to remove the branch completely off the trunk from where it originated to make the tree more wind tolerant and avoid taking an interesting wind pattern shape.

Some trees have a nasty habit of wanting to become the ‘mother of a forest’, sending up what we call ‘suckers’ from their root system, which can appear all over the place.

Gardeners with a tree that suckers will find saplings coming up in the lawn, often several metres away from the mother.

If you want to keep the parent you can’t use a herbicide to kill the suckers as that will badly affect the parent and may kill it with continual treatments.

All you can do is keep cutting the suckers off when they appear.

You may at sometime decide to cut a tree out completely. If you do so by cutting through the trunk with a chainsaw you are likely to create the worst problem ever.

If you wish to remove a tree whether it suckers or not, the safe way to do it is to ring bark it.

This means cutting through the bark into the live wood a couple of centimetres so right around the girth of the trunk.

What this does is cut the canopy off from the roots, so the roots do not get any energy from the sun and the canopy gets no moisture from the roots and both die together.

After the tree has died then you can fell it, if you are capable, and the best way to do this is by progressively removing branches and then sections of the trunk or get in a tree removal service.

Once the tree is down, you have a pile of firewood which is great if you have a wood burner otherwise donate the wood to a charity for a family that can make use of it.

The tree stump can be used as a garden seat, to sit a container plant on, or pay to have a stump grinder come in and reduce to a pile of wood chips.

Alternatively you can rot the stump out yourself using Stump Rotter, a potassium nitrate that helps to speed up the break down of the wooden stump over time.

It is not a quick process and may, instead of taking say 10 years naturally, do it in five.

We have recently brought in a compound from overseas that will break down stumps much faster and it will be called Super Stump Rotter.

One other point with grafted trees is that you may find on examination new growths coming out of the root stock.

If allowed to grow, these would take over and your scion (the tree above that you want) would die.

So every three months or so check for these shoots and nip them off.