Arboricultural Systems Integration

04/01/2021

Tree Preservation After the Subzero Event
The damage to Live Oaks (Quercus virginiana) are quite obvious. These normally evergreen trees have had their foliage blasted from the prolonged subzero weather. We expected this after our experience with this nonnative species in the similar weather in the winter of 1983-1984. Our clients followed our suggestions back then, and their trees survived. This event produced a different, and perhaps greater, effect upon this species. Remember, we are north of the native range of Live Oaks.
What we anticipate is a significant reduction in the energy reserves of these trees. Trees store energy (in the form of starch/sugar/carbohydrates) in the root system. If this is reduced significantly, then the tree may experience moderate to severe problems dealing with fungal or bacterial challenges, as well as being targeted by opportunistic insects. Compromised trees will also be much more vulnerable to inappropriate applications of broad leafed herbicides meant to control w**ds. Being weakened may make them expire due to applications of such herbicides, especially “w**d & feed” fertilizers. W**d & Feed fertilizers are NEVER to be used in the root zone areas of woody stemmed plants (trees and shrubs).
We have the knowledge and technology to assist home and business owners to preserve stressed and damaged trees. We often bring such trees back to full health and function. We can recreate the humus layer of a healthy forest floor BENEATH your turf. Essentially, we inject micronutrients, soil amendments, and capillary flow enhancers about eight inches into the soil under very high pressure. This high pressure (350PSI) also fractures the soil as if we were roto tilling the soil, but without the associated damage to the root system, and often the death of the tree.
Stressed trees attract insects, both those that munch foliage and the much more deadly boring insects that consume the living sapwood at prodigious rates. The latter are far more insidious, because we don’t see them at work. We can inject control agents into the sapwood of trees to stop boring insects in their tracks, as well as over active foliage consumers.
We are the experts at tree preservation and have set the mark for North Texas for fifty plus years. Call Arboricultural Systems Integration at 972-772-5314 for an assessment of your freeze damage. We will relay our scientific observations and evaluation in a forthright manner so that you can make an informed decision concerning your plant population. All of our work is backed up with formal proposals so that there will be no surprises or hidden costs. Any time we provide a service to a client, we do so with a written contract.

03/01/2021

1984 and 2021 Freeze Mortalities

The recent spate of hard freezes damaged more than plumbing. Stately trees may have suffered serious damage. But, before you succumb to a doorknocker’s glib push to remove your damaged tree, let us determine whether it can recover.

Just because a tree lost all its foliage in a hard freeze may not indicate the plant is dead. Root systems store carbohydrates for such challenges. The carbs provide the energy to refoliate, usually in the first spring following defoliation. We can examine buds and cambial tissue to provide a client a better picture of the chances of survival. We can also provide soil amendments, nutrients, root growth hormones, and capillary flow enhancers to assist the tree in recovery.

One of our primary shade trees in north central and northeast Texas is the Live Oak (Quercus virginiana). Unfortunately, the native range is south of the Metroplex, which does not include Dallas, Tarrant, Hunt, Hopkins, or Rockwall counties. In the winter of 1983-84, we had subzero temperatures for weeks. Every night the temperature dipped to Artic temperatures, but during the day the temp often climbed above freezing. Freezing and refreezing a dozen times is far more damaging than a single, sustained, freeze. Ice crystals are more likely to form, and pe*****te cell walls, creating massive damage.

I surveyed millions of dollars of damage to the Live Oak population in this area, but it wasn’t the freeze that killed most of them. They died at the hands of the ignorant and the unscrupulous. Many Live Oaks suffered girdling injuries about the base of the tree. The bark (and cambial tissue) froze and fell off the trunk of the tree, leaving bare, drying, sapwood. Generally, a loss of over 50% of a tree’s bark and cambial tissue is considered a total loss. But we had never observed this particular injury in the recorded past, so I decided to take a very conservative approach, especially when someone started talking about removing the tree. But many individuals and several large tree service companies in the Metroplex and North Texas capitalized on everyone’s lack of experience in this regard. They pronounced the trees as a total loss. In reality, the trees still had green cambial tissue everywhere else in a given specimen, and most had the bulk of their foliage intact.

Well into the spring, while examining a client’s freeze damaged Live Oaks, I noticed several little warty protuberances scattered over the dried, cracking, sapwood. At first I thought the odd items to be fungal fruiting bodies. I collected one and dissected it right there. Strangely, it appeared to have cambial tissue, and xylem (sapwood) tissue just below the surface. Again, life taught me that there is a lot we still don’t know about this world!

Those little warts grew into marble sized lumps and bumps that expanded until they became a solid sheet of sapwood with developing bark upon the surface. In two to three years, you could not determine whether the tree had ever suffered such freeze damage. Sadly, thousands of Live Oaks in yards all across North Texas were missing, due to an untimely meeting with a chainsaw.
So, my friends, don’t listen to the door knocker! Send him packing. And if he has a fancy sign on his truck, that means he is perhaps more than ignorant.

We did have clients’ trees that suffered some invasions by insects due to the stress induced by the process. Most of them had other stress factors contributing. Use of W**d & Feed fertilizers is never good for trees and shrubs! Some merely suffered long term nutrient depletion, which we corrected. We are also fortunate to have the single most effective tool to combat devastating boring insect invasions. We can kill the in their tunnels beneath the bark or in the sapwood in hours without turning the yard into a toxic waste zone. We have saved many thousands of trees with our insect control methodology.

You will observe a significant amount of foliage damage due to this prolonged Artic chill, but I expect healthy trees to make a good recovery with a modicum of professional care. Trees that were seriously stressed prior to the weather event will have a higher mortality rate. But we can skew the numbers into our clients’ favor.

Respectfully submitted,

Stan Randall
Staff Arboriculturist


Robert Randall
Certified Arborist (TX-1126A)

02/12/2021

Upscale tree preservation company. No, we don't do utility clearance or slash and bash work.

02/11/2021

WARNING! ALERT! WARNING!

This artic freeze may damage your trees, landscape, and turf! If possible, water deeply tomorrow when the temps get above freezing. Hopefully your irrigation system has a ‘drain down’ feature. But what is more valuable? Your entire landscape or you irrigation hoses and pipes?

In the winter of 1983-’84, we had subzero temps every night for two weeks in much of North Texas. The most susceptible high value plants that were damaged were our Live Oaks (Quercus virginiana). The bark sloughed off many of the trees, just above grade on the south side. Far too many people listened to uneducated doorknockers and had their Live Oaks removed. You see, we are north of the native range of Live Oaks, so they are more challenged by colder than normal winters.

Our clients listened to us and we waited and watched to see how the trees responded. We discovered that Live Oaks can move undifferentiated tissue to new locations. They produced new cambial tissue and began building new sapwood! Our clients’ trees benefited from additional nutrients, and some prophylactic insect treatments, but they all survived. Our clients also followed our watering directions.

You see, soil can reach ambient air temperature. Monday we are looking at ONE to FIVE degrees above zero. At that temperature, ice crystals form and pe*****te cell walls. Freeze an orange, and then thaw it out, to see what happens to internal tissues. If the soil is damp, then the temperature does not fall below 32 degrees. The root systems of most of our landscape grasses, ground covers, and woody stemmed plants (trees and shrubs) can withstand this.

Stan Randall
Staff Arboriculturist
ARBORICULTURAL SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
2287 South FM 549 Rockwall, TX 75032
http://www.arboricultural.com/
Email: [email protected]
972-772-5314 (Metroplex)
903-439-5565 (Cell)

The Tree Preservation Professionals who can recognized tree diseases, insects, and cultivation issues that may cost you a valuable tree.

03/16/2020

On the positive side of all this concern about CV19, we are hiring! We are a tree preservation company (not a slash and bash tree and trash hauling operation!). We will train a person in the high tech end of tree cultivation and mature tree preservation for two years and sponsor them to become a Texas Certified Arborist. One must be physically fit and enjoy working outdoors. A GED is required for becoming a Certified Arborist. And, of course, we don't work in large crowds! 972-772-5314

10/21/2019

Have us assess the structural integrity of your trees BEFORE bad weather occurs!

11/11/2018

The Bur Oak, or Burr Oak (Quecus macrocarpa), produces a huge acorn. These are the size of golf balls, or larger. I picked up about 20 pounds of them (two shopping bags full) this evening. We'll be rowing them under composted mulch so they will sprout in the spring. Then they will be collected and planted around our place, and much later our clients' properties.

This is a solid, low maintenance, tree for larger yards. The large acorns will jam up gutters, and even dent cars, so keep them located properly.

10/13/2018

We have invested in a 60', track mounted, lift that can access most of our client's front and back yards. It can fit through 31" gates, or a doorway. With a very low weight per square inch, we are not risking root damage to trees, as would occur with a bucket truck. Bucket trucks may weigh 40,000 pounds, which can crush major roots and thereby introduce soil borne decay organisms directly into the tree's vascular system.

This lift will speed up the process of pruning, cable installation and cavity repairs with a higher level of safety for our clients' property, as well as raising the safety level of our employees. We work hard to keep extending our record of ZERO time lost accidents on any job site (45 years, so far!).

10/13/2018

07/07/2018

We are in the process of creating the most powerful collection of tools to provide our clients with the most effective tree preservation service in this part of the world! And Robert Randall knows how to operate it all!

04/07/2018

Carpenterworm (Prionoxystus robiniae)

This pest may be the single most destructive individual found within a tree. While other insects do their damage via numbers, this single larva may destroy a tree without assistance. But sometimes several hatch and succeed in entering the tree. Only a few eggs are laid by a moth on a tree. One or more of the hatched worms may enter the three and bore deeply into the tree.

Generally, it is thought that the worm goes to the heartwood. However, examination of photos sorted by region indicate it may go towards the heartwood in colder regions, where thicker insulation is required for larval survival at lower temperatures. But trees we have examined in North and Northeast Texas indicate at higher feeding rate is concentrated in the sapwood. And of course in younger trees, as our photos illustrate, there just isn’t a lot of heartwood.

This is a large larva. Some I have found were over half an inch in diameter. So they not only interrupt the flow of nutrients and water, but actually destroy the strength of limbs, or the trunks of smaller trees. They can kill. And of course secondary pests and disease can gain quick access to the interior of the tree thanks to this pest.

We can control them. Our injection of a control agent into the sapwood of a tree kills all internal parasites quickly as they consume the tree’s tissues. So we eliminate this pest, as well as its smaller relatives.

This pest does not present a glaringly obvious problem. A borer infestation reveals itself with multiple weep holes exuding sap. This one may have just a tiny entry hole produced when it was very small. But that is adequate for an air supply. When it exits the tree, we then see a much larger diameter hole. Unfortunately, the adult female may lay her eggs right back in the same tree, driving the population of her destructive progeny up past the level that the tree can tolerate. And if this happens several years in a row, the tree may expire without warning as too much sapwood is interrupted or destroyed. So control measures should be instituted as soon as possible.

We do have some strong evidence that these pests tend to target stressed trees, therefore we must avoid cultural challenges or factors that predispose the trees to such invasions. We don’t want to treat the tree many years into the future, but rather correct the cultural deficits.

09/08/2017

Recently it came to our attention that a local media personality proposed a rather startling tree care technique. He advises rubbing ‘compost’ into tree wounds. We must state that this flies in the face of a huge body of peer reviewed research, as well as a long history of well-informed, well-educated, long experienced arborists, plant pathologists, and botanists.

Composted material may cook w**d seeds and kill them, but many deleterious fungal, bacterial, and viral organisms survive the composting process. Some that may be found, will affect humans, also: tetanus, aspergillus, Legionnaire’s disease, histoplasmosis, and paronychia provide quite real threats to farmers and gardeners. This is why masks must be worn, and dry gloves donned, when digging in compost or using compost. Some of these can produce life threatening diseases, while others can incapacitate one for days, weeks or months.

Now, it should also be obvious, considering the very long list of microorganisms that affect people, that there is an equal, or even larger array, of those that can cause your trees serious problems. Shredded or chipped wood from Hypoxylon infected trees might be relatively safe when incorporated into compost, however the spores are known to survive well in the soil. It is for this reason that we strongly advise tree owners to avoid damage to the basal flare or surface roots of trees. Such wounds are easily infected by rain splashing the spore laden soil into the wound.

Research by Texas A&M and other agricultural researchers indicates that Hypoxylon may lie dormant for many decades beneath the bark of a tree, hindered in expansion by the high moisture content of the underlying sapwood. But if the tree is stressed or drought affected, the Hypoxylon may explode in growth and kill the tree within a year or two.

Therefore, we strongly advise against rubbing compost into tree wounds. It doesn’t matter if the tree’s wounds arise from the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, boring insects, or impact trauma, we want to keep those wounds clean. UV light will often kill many disease organisms, so we do not recommend use of asphalt pruning sprays. In the splash zone of the trunk, basal flare and surface roots, we may wish to consider sealing the wound with orange shellac.

Concurrent with this less than savory application of compost to tree wounds, is the suggestion that one can use fire place ashes in the mix of compost. Please be aware that some trees, particularly our smaller growing understory trees such as Dogwoods (Cornus florida), Redbud (Cercis canadensis) and Japanese Maples (Acer palmatum) that perform best in acid soils may not perform well when one adds fire place ashes to their root zones. Alkalizing their root zones may result in systemic shock, serious chlorosis, and opportunistic insects moving targeting such stressed trees.

What is most important about tree wounds is insuring that they are shaped properly in order to promote the most rapid sealing by new callus tissue. For that, one is best served by consulting a qualified arborist or arboriculturist. Beware of those that recommend home remedies that have not withstood review by those that adhere to the Scientific Method!