Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
RAIN, RAIN GO AWAY
Oversaturated trees struggle to survive rainy year
It’s wet where it never was before.
That’s how Ray Smith sums up the impact of the region’s abundant rains on trees.
Smith, owner of Spring Garden Farms Inc., 1585 Main St., Robeson Township, Berks County, said he’s been hearing complaints from customers and colleagues in the nursery business, and they all center on trees developing root rot and other maladies brought on by too much rain.
National Weather Service rainfall statistics show that this June was the sixth-wettest since 1869. The database spans 150 years. The automated equipment at Reading Regional Airport recorded 7.96 inches in June. Normal for June is 3.78 inches.
Other key points:
• June ended the wettest 12 months on record: 75.36 inches.
• It has been the third-wettest first half of a year: 31.36 inches.
• In short, the weather is unprecedentedly soggy.
Smith said the rain had already been impacting fruits and vegetables, but now is starting to affect trees.
“Most of the trees will not take wet feet,” Smith said. “Some will, but they’re usually the ones you don’t want, like willows.
“I’ve had a lot of people complaining about their leaves
changing colors and it’s the leaves are going bad,” he said. “I’ve had people coming in saying they’re losing trees, and others want to know what type of tree grows in wet because it’s wet where it never was before.”
The deluges kill
Preston Eshelman, operating manager of Plow Farms, his family’s nursery at 4410 Morgantown Road, Robeson Township, said he has seen the ravages to trees of too much rain.
“We have trees that have been planted in the ground for four, five, six years and have thrived until all this rain,” Eshelman said. “We’ve seen them die just over the past year because of too much rain.”
It’s a common subject of conversation on Plow Farms, he said.
“We’ve noticed a large amount of stock that has died that was established in the ground and was healthy until this point,” he said.
Which trees are lost (die off) depends a lot on where they were planted. Places that hold more water might have been more desirable in the past, but not during the monsoonlike season that has taken hold of the Mid-Atlantic.
“Some areas we’ve lost 20 to 30 percent because of all the rain,” Eshelman said.
If it were a normal cycle of hot summer days, late afternoon thunderstorms and then dry nights, the stock of evergreen and deciduous trees at Plow Farm probably would be just fine, he said.
“The problem we’re having is the amounts of rainfall,” Eshelman said. “Like we’re seeing a storm dump an inch or more of rain and it rains again before that rain has anywhere to go.
“I can’t remember anything this bad. So many large rainfalls, over an inch of rain that came over a couple of hours. The trees never had a chance to absorb it. It’s like flash flooding constantly.”
The problem is also present in deciduous shade trees. The more water that shade trees get, the more leaves they put on. Too much rain causes a young tree to put on more leaves than its young trunk can handle. If a strong wind gust comes along, the heavy wet head of the tree will snap the trunk.
“It’s a Catch-22, where you need the water to grow but they get too much water and they outgrow their trunk system,” Eshelman said. “We haven’t seen that before.”
Homeowners looking to add trees to their property should consult an expert, or conduct research to make sure the species they are considering is well suited for the soil and the area.
The fungus factor
Be they evergreen or deciduous, trees are taking it hard.
Like all plants, trees like water, some more than others.
The maladies tree owners are seeing are most likely weather-related, said DeeDee Kerscher, volunteer horticulture program assistant and master gardener for the Penn State Extension.
“If the trees are heavily needled they don’t get much air circulation to dry them off,” Kerscher said. “We’re getting a lot of things that are not supposed to get mildew getting mildew this year because now we have this hot humid weather. Things aren’t drying off and that’s causing a lot of fungal diseases.
“It’s weather related. That’s what we’re telling people.”
Kerscher said there is almost nothing tree owners can do to save their investments.
“They may recover; they may not,” she said. “Once it has a fungal disease, you can spray but we don’t recommend that. It’s very expensive.”
The extension normally recommends letting nature take its course.
An indicator a tree is in distress is that when it starts turning brown in the interior of its branches it will start to produce new blooms of needles, seeds and acorns in an effort to propagate its species.
“Mother Nature has a way of fixing things,” Kerscher said. “We’re getting a lot of regular trees, too. The ones that are heavily leaved, they can’t dry off.”