Robinia Frisia

[ellie2cats]

My Robinia now 14 years old has always been a delight and greatly admired.  This year over half the leaves fell at the end of May and now (Oct 30th) there is not a leaf in sight.  Did the drought kill it or will it come back next spring? Would feeding it help?  Perhaps I should have watered it but it seemed to be so well established.

Ellie

[ellie2cats]

[isbister]

It may be a fungal disease there's been a lot of it about this year what with the wet weather. Not much to be done other than clear up all the fallen leaves so as not to reinfect next year.

[Palustris]

They are not a very long lived tree and they do have this nasty habit of dying on one. There is very little one can do other than as suggested. We have to remove a fair number of dead branches every year on ours.

[tabbycat]

The same thing happened to ours. It was about 15 or so years old, i think it was planted when the house was built. It just gave up the ghost a couple of summers ago and never had leaves on it again.

They are very brittle trees and when the wood is dead, they are also quite dangerous as they have spikes on them. When the wind blew, huge bits of it would just snap off, so we called the tree surgeon in to take it down. He was very wary about climbing more than half way up the main truck as he was convinced it would snap under his weight (too many bacon sarnies  ;D)

Tabby

[Pesky Wabbit]

Unless your in a hurry to replant something this winter, give it a chance to see if it show signs of life next spring. They're too nice a tree to cut down unnecessarily.