Darth Mom
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what could have killed my Japanese Maple?

This Japanese Maple 'Viridis' was planted late spring 2016. The first year it did very well. It is in an area that gets full sun until early afternoon. Last spring, it leafed out beautifully, but within a few weeks, the leaves turned brown and began to fall. All of the leaves were gone by July. A "tree expert" told us not to do anything but keep it watered during dry weather, and it would come back the next spring. A friend has the same tree, and hers died of the second year, too, but it revived. Mine didn't. I gave it the scratch test yesterday and I don't think it is alive. What could have caused it to die off so quickly? Disease? Rodents chewing on the roots? We are in Western Pennsylvania, well within the growing area of the US for this tree.
Thanks in advance.
Dead_Maple.jpg

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applestar
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Joined: Thu May 01, 2008 7:21 pm
Location: Zone 6, NJ (3/M)4/E ~ 10/M(11/B)

Here in South Jersey area — where winters might be warmer than where you are if you are at higher elevation — our Japanese maples will experience winter die off and inevitably a whole bunch of branches will dry up and die. We had colder than recent few years winter this past year, and your newly planted tree may not have been ready for that, especially if they had a difficult/interrupted growth last year.

Why it lost leaves last year is a mystery — I’ll speculate about it later. But looking at your photo, the silver-grey looking branches are typical appearance of died-off. If you flick those branches, I think they will sound/feel hollow, and if you bend them they would snap right off. This is how I test for winter die off. Start with the obvious ones. Once you get the feel for how brittle they are, try some of the colored branches that may still have life in them. If it doesn’t snap despite putting some effort, it is likely alive.

I go over the tree after breaking off the died-off twigs and branches and clean-cut the breaks as needed.

If you end up with nothing but the trunk, look carefully for buds. Japanese maple can and will sprout buds from seemingly empty bark. But if even the trunk is sounding hollow/dried up when cut and nothing is showing all the way down to the graft, then it’s lost.

...now for pure speculation... does any of the following apply to your tree or your friends tree?

I used to have a Japanese Maple tree near the NE corner of my property. It was not a good location for it on several counts - it lost all its leaves once... I tried to nurse it back to health, but various environmental factors stressed it out too much and it never recovered

- exposed area with no protection from buildings or other trees
- too close to neighbor’s property. Definitely was hit at least once or twice by swath/sweep of herbicide << evidence in the dead grass swath — lost all its leaves
- compacted clay subsoil and drain field from neighbor’s raingutter left the area soggy and wet during rainy season and during spring thaw
- drought parched the ground and the location was too far from any spigot or reach of our garden hose


Japanese Maple is shallow rooted and severe drought will definitely kill it. I have two in front of the house that are flourishing but before I realized this, I didn’t take care to water them during a particularly bad drought one summer and they dropped all their leaves during the summer. They surprised us by leafing out when the fall rains arrived, then I worried that they would die off from expending too much energy and growing new growths, but the flip side of the drought was that we had a relatively mild winter that year.

...I wasn’t taking a picture of the trees so this isn’t a great shot, but here they are

Image



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