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Archive for the ‘Plant management’ Category

This past summer my good friend, Consulting Arborist Carl Cathcart took me to see an unusual weeping hemlock in a suburb of Boston.  He had shown it to me earlier in the spring, when we got to see it from the road.  This time, he had gotten permission from the owners to examine the tree close [...]

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This past week I had occasion to pass the same suburban Massachusetts middle school on two days in a row, and on each of those days my eyes goggled at the sight of a new planting on a slope facing the road.  The array of brown, grey, and coppery-red foliage — on the trees that [...]

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The other day I was on Beacon Hill and spotted this mostly dead hemlock tree, completely swathed in Boston ivy: Perhaps the owners were simply neglecting their courtyard garden, but I like to think that they saw the mature tree’s size as an asset to the place, and decided to use the deadwood as an [...]

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I took a great class this past January at the Arnold Arboretum.  It was called Grafting Techniques for Ornamental Trees, and was taught by Jack Alexander, the Arboretum’s Plant Propagator.  Jack, who is not only an extremely talented plantsman but an excellent teacher, taught us how to prepare cuttings, how to make several different kinds [...]

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If we can clone crabapples, maples, and chamaecyparis, why can’t we clone the enormous redwoods that stand as the world’s tallest trees?  Well, apparently we can. This article in Sunday’s New York Times (4/10/2011) explains how a group of arborists dedicated to propagating and planting clonal stands of coastal and giant sequoias, using tissue and cuttings [...]

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Yesterday I swung by the site where Herbie, the American Elm in Yarmouth, Maine, had stood for over two centuries.  Herbie was taken down last January; to read the tale see this post, and to see photos of Herbie’s stump, click on this link. I hadn’t planned to stop and see the stump — what [...]

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Last year I worked on a large mall planting project.  A number of trees had to be pulled out to make way for a new parking layout; the islands they had been growing in were removed and paved over, with new islands located in a different configuration.  Most of the trees were hauled away by [...]

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Mark Smith, construction project manager for Belknap Landscape Company in Gilford, NH, sent me photos and a description of the air-tool transplant his company executed with Piscataqua Landscaping recently.  Belknap has been using air tools for transplanting, site preparation (excavating roots at foundation limit lines prior to the foundation excavation), and root forensics, and has also used [...]

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Last week I drove to Wellesley College to see the Dwarf Alberta Spruce that Jim Doyle and Don Garrick had moved bare-root last November.  Fritz Hoffman, an Alaska contractor in town to learn about bare-root transplant work, accompanied me, and we walked and walked along the lakeshore looking for the Spruce. Well, it wasn’t there. [...]

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A reader, Mark Vanderwouw from Shady Lane Expert Tree Care, Inc. wrote a comment on the post titled Another Air-Tool Bare-Root Transplanting (cross-posted from TakingPlace.net, the other blog I co-write for landscape architects).  His company is excavating out several large specimen trees for a one-year storage period, after which they will plant the trees in [...]

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