Dwarf Japanese Maple half dead?

sjg94002 · Thu Jun 04, 2009 10:52 pm

We have what I believe to be a Dwarf Japanese Maple in our yard, courtesy the previous owner. A few weeks ago I noticed that half the plant appeared to be dead. At the time I thought it was just because part of the plant was slow to bloom, but that does not seem to be the case.

Has anybody seen this before? Will the plant recover next spring, or is it dead for good? Is there anything I can do to help speed the recovery?

[img]https://twitpic.com/show/thumb/4uw71.jpg[/img]

[url=https://twitpic.com/4uw71]Full-size photo[/url]

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.
Steve

bewildered_nmsu · Fri Jun 05, 2009 4:19 am

Cut off any dead parts of the plant, they will not come back to life. Could have been caused by under-watering or poor soil drainage.

bullthistle · Fri Jun 05, 2009 8:41 am

Or it could have been exposed to winter elements, wind & sun,like maybe the bottom part was under the snow and the top not.

sjg94002 · Sun Jun 28, 2009 4:06 pm

Thanks for the responses. I'm concerned that if I cut off the dead parts of the plant then there will be nothing left, it has impacted probably 66-75% of the plant.

We did have a lot of snow this winter (I'm in CT), I hadn't thought of that. I was originally thinking it might be animal related because I saw some deer in the neighborhood. We also had an invisible dog fence put in last fall, but it is probably 3 feet from this plant; I can't imagine that the fence installation would have hurt the root ball.

The whole thing is very strange because many of our neighbors have the same plant and our is the only one that had this happen.

Thanks again for all your help.
Steve

Haesuse · Mon Jun 29, 2009 12:33 pm

have you watered it? have your neighbors watered theirs? looking at it makes me think that it just went through a tough couple of fairly dry months, and dropped a ton of leaves. feel the branches that are "dead". if they are still pliable, and flexible, and not brittle and super dry, then it might not be dead, even on those parts. before I did ANYthing, I'd just put it on a regular watering schedule for a few weeks, and see how it does.