Last week I was out consulting a family retreat center on some tree issues that have cropped up on the property. The biggest problem was a roughly 100 year old maple which had become diseased over the past couple of years due to a number of factors.
The tree was there before the people, this is usually the trees biggest problem. People start making “improvements” to the area where the tree lives and trees see improvements different than people.
Many times new landscaping damages the root zones of trees, adding soil on top of the roots and then laying sod or planting turf grass, affecting air, water and nutrient movement in the root zone.
The soil organisms feed the roots and they live mostly in the top 3″ of the soil, so feeder roots grow there. Adding soil on top of this chokes out the microbes and they move away from feeding roots.