"Steve" wrote in message
...
I live in East Scotland and have a beautiful but unidentified tree that
is
about 5m tall and has lovely pink and white new leaves (or maybe bracts?)
at this time of year. Last year it developed a disease of some sort which
causes the shoots to die back from the tip, going black and splitting.
Cutting out all the diseased parts as they developed last year didn't
help.
There are pictures at http://www.rosebud.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
any help identifying the tree and or the disease would be very much
appreciated
TIA
Steve
Hi Steve,
I've had this tree...populus canadensis Aurea...variagated poplar...in my
front garden for seven years now, in order to keep it's wonderful colour it
needs to be kept at a height of between 6 - 8 ft. We keep ours around the 7
mark. We had a very similar problem with ours late last summer and again
early this year we found it starting again, we also found it was infested
with caterpillars. We dealt with the caterpillar problem by spraying with
syndol and two weeks ago took out the secateurs and gave it a good pruning,
we literally freed up the inside of the tree, cutting out any branches that
were crossing each other, we left the outer branches so as to keep its
shape. Essentially we thinned the inside parts to allow lots of light and
air in. When all that was done we gave it a good feed with nettle
fertiliser. After only two weeks the tree has lots and lots of new shoots,
the variagation is absolutely beautiful, pink, peach, white, green and
yellow and the catterpillars are gone. We're very pleased with the job. This
was all done *in the hopes* it was the right way of going about the problem,
we were basically working on instinct, but it certainly seems to have made
a marked difference to the tree so it's worked for us
and it wasn't caker
as we originally thought.
This snippett from GQT may help
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/gqt/fshe...sheetsq7.shtml
HTH
--
Shan (Ireland)
http://ukdiscus.com/main.htm
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