P. van Rijckevorsel wrote:
"a_plutonium" schreef
The rabbits ate all the way around and about a band width of my hand.

***
I should read more carefully. If the cambium has indeed been removed over
such a width there is not much chance of the tree itself repairing the
cambium.

The green leaves themselves don't mean much, as the sap stream upwards goes
through the wood, presumably not eaten into by the rabbits, so that the
leaves do get water. The stream downwards carrying sugar from the leaves to
the roots goes through the bark, which is gone. The roots will be the first
to die (this may take a year or more). Only then the rest of the tree will
die as well.

Trees do have capability to repair the cambium, but this will depend upon
the width to be repaired. A hand's width sounds like a lot.
PvR

As the Toronto poster noted that the leaves will shrivel up, happened
to me on a apricot
tree that was only partially eaten by rabbits. And at that time I
thought that perhaps rabbits
have something in their saliva or mouth that infects trees because the
eaten portion was
small yet the tree stunted growth was huge.

In the case of the locust, green spots about the size of my nail head
of cambium came
back and the tree is as if normal.

As for this apple tree, the leaves are doing great, even better than
the same sized tree
next to it. The damage was extensive though. And it appears as though
a tiny sliver the
width of a ball point pen was not eaten by the rabbits as to where two
branches were
in the way, so the rabbits did not girdle the total 360 degrees. So
maybe that one sliver
is enough to save the whole tree.

I will keep monitoring it.

I have a section of a field at another place where I am trying to grow
rows of amur maples for
5 years now. The rabbits there are very dense and last years have
eaten these maples to the ground.
So I put tomato cages wrapped with chicken wire which helps very much.
Those protected
are now 4 feet tall. Those unprotected have been eaten to the ground
and have to put out new
shouts every year.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies