As you may know, this blog started as a series of posts on our other blog, Taking Place. I branched it off that blog to avoid unbalancing the whole endeavor, and began posting on woody plant issues here. I am currently working on copying older posts from Taking Place over to this blog as well (they’ll remain at Taking Place, too, as they are important there) — but it’s taking me a while.
So — if you want to read older posts on bare-root transplanting (root-washing and air-tool excavation), or on woody plants in design and woody plant management, you’ll be able to read current (from August onward) posts here, but will have to wait a bit for the older ones to arrive on this site. If you just can’t wait, though, you can see all my pre-Taking Place In The Trees woody plants posts by clicking on the highlighted name — Taking Place — in the first paragraph. That blog will then pop up.
Once that happens, scroll down and click on ‘Plants’ in the Categories list to the right of the page; doing so will make the list of tree and shrub posts pop up. Scan through the list, and click on whatever title interests you to bring up the whole post, including some excellent photos.
And if you like what you see and read, take a look at the rest of the Taking Place site — there are some dandy photos and lots of observations on landscape architecture, design, and how we live in the green world.
Cute little 'Gumball' dwarf Liquidambar, freed from its container and soil washed away with the hose, ready to have its circling roots unwound, spread radially (as best as possible), and planted.
Deborah Howe
Taking Place In The Trees 
So this is not done with the air spade but is on the same principle?
That’s right. You can wash the roots of container or B&B plants with a hose. High pressure works best to loosen the soil, as the roots may well have gotten numerous and dense enough to hold onto soil with some tenacity. Too, root ball soil direct from a nursery may be quite clayey, depending on where the plant was grown, and getting rid of the soil will permit much better rooting in to the site soil.
You can see more info on root-washing at http://www.takingplace.net in two posts dated July 24 (they’ll be on this site sometime in the near future, as well). Those posts show root-washing done at Cavicchio’s, a Massachusetts nursery, where a stressed pin oak got freed from it’s B&B wrappings and planted into the ground. Carl Cathcart had taken photos of the root-washing process last fall, and this summer he and I visited the tree, and saw how well it has taken to being bare-rooted for transplanting.