On Apr 21, 7:06*am, "brooklyn1" wrote:
"MiamiCuse" wrote in message

... In our circular driveway we have a border around a 20' tall Queens Crepe
Myrtle tree made of a few 4x4 landscape lumber tied together with metal
angles. *We are going to change that to using retaining wall bricks.

One question is the wall would be a foot higher than the current height of
the 4x4s. *I am thinking may be I need to fill in some soils inside the
ring to bring that up 6 inches or so. *Would doing so hurt the tree in any
way, adding 6 inches of soil and another 2" of much at it's base?

I am going about 4 bricks tall, each brick 8 inches tall. *The guy I was
talking to that may help me install this says there is no need to use
mortar in between each brick all we need to do is to have some sand base
and stack them up. *Is that the case?

It's already bad enough that the tree is surrounded by pavement, adding soil
over it's roots is as bad an idea as paving right up to its trunk, you will
very likely kill that tree. *You can swap the lumber border for masonary but
do not fill it in... and ideally the opening in the pavement should be at
least the diameter of the tree's drip line when it matures, now is the time
to enlarge that opening.

I cannot open the pavement up. The tree drip line does extend beyond
the soil area, which is somewhat of a semi-circle. Outside of that is
the driveway, then the house. The driveway is just about the right
width for one car, and it's a concrete driveway, so making the soil
area any larger is not practical, unless we want to lose the driveway
altogether.

So I will not raise the soil level, and just replace the semi-circular
wood border with a brick border. The other problem I have is that
when it rains in Miami, the rain occasionally floods the streets and
the wood border "floats" out a few times. I had a few rebars securing
it, no matter, it still lifts a bit.

Thanks,