wrote:
In article . com,
a_plutonium wrote:
I had some awful rabbit attacks on a locust sapling and a 5 year old
apple tree whose trunk was about the
thickness of my upper arm. The rabbits ate all the way around and
about a band width of my hand. I had thought
both were going to die. But the locust started putting green circular
spots where the rabbits had eaten and the
tree is coming back in full force. The apple tree was hit worse by the
rabbits and appears as though the leaves
are coming in full force also.

Get some tree protectors before next winter.

So what is the deal with cambium and what does it take to kill a tree
by its cambium?

It's not unusual for severely damaged trees like this to start to leaf
in the spring, using resources already present in the branches, but if
the trees are as severely girdled as you describe, the new growth will
soon shrivel and die.

You may be able to save the trees by bridge grafting if you act fast
enough. The trees will probably try to come back from below the damage,
but if this tissue is below the graft you won't get the apples you
expect. For the locust, you can let it put up root sprouts, and clip
off most of them, letting the others develop into trunks.

Good luck!

I promised to check back and report how this apple tree had done. It
was severely
girdled by rabbits and had just a sliiver of bark that was continuous
upward. But it
leafed out as normal and the barren bark trunk turned greenish and is
now as
normal.

So my conclusion is that rabbits rarely kill a plant. They kill things
like my
baby pine trees when they eat off the top leaving nothing but a stalk
with no
needles remaining. That is the only time I have seen rabbits actually
killing a
plant I planted. So I think rabbit damage is bad for nurseries buying
and selling
plant stock, but for the actually killing of plant stock is somewhat
overblown and hype.

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