On 3/1/12 6:59 AM, squaredog wrote:
Newbie here.....new to your site, and at gardening, so any answers,
please don't make them difficult for me to understand, will you?

I've just moved into a bungalow, with a very mature cherry tree, I would
guess 30ft high. Down the bottom of the trunk, in a section, and also at
the top, kinda where the branches start coming out, there are bore holes
in another section. The bottom bit, to me, looks sort of dead in that
place.

The tree is such a beautiful feature in the garden, that the last thing
I want to do is to lose it.

Please, please, can someone tell me what I can do to save it.

PS. Now please don't all be alarmed, you gardeners, but as a dog owner,
I'm having 'astro-turf' fitted up to, and around it next week. (I did
tell you I wasn't a gardener, didn't I?)

To save the tree, I strongly suggest you hire an arborist to examine and
treat it.

If you lay down Astroturf, it will prevent rain from irrigating your
garden unless the plastic mats are perforated. Non-porous Astroturf
over the root zone of the cherry tree will surely kill the tree even if
it did not have borers. (The "root zone" is the area around the tree
under the farthest-reaching branches. If you cut back the branches,
however, that does not reduce the area of the root zone.)

--
David E. Ross
Climate: California Mediterranean, see
http://www.rossde.com/garden/climate.html
Gardening diary at http://www.rossde.com/garden/diary