Posts Tagged ‘root bound’
Plant Rescue
We were given possession of a root-bound ZZ plant (zamioculcas zamiifolia) by friends who were reclaiming some space in their home. Our daughter, Elysa, and Cyndie separated it into 5 different pots yesterday.
I’m hoping we can make it a companion to our Bird of Paradise plant that Elysa and Ande gave us after having gone through a similar exercise of separating and repotting that beauty. They should make a great pair.
While we were at Elysa’s, I did my feeble best to rescue her 2-door fence gate. I can’t fathom how eight screws (4+4) in two hinges completely sheared off one of the doors. I was thinking I might be able to simply move the hinges on the door until I discovered they were part of a metal frame that spans the entire width of the door.
We ended up raising the whole thing half an inch and screwing it into the post. It is now reattached, but getting it to butt up against the other door requires a little extra effort with a lift and a shove.
Cyndie shifted her focus to pruning dead shoots from some very vigorous raspberry bushes along the fence.
When we were ready to wrap up our visit, my car was filled with the larger of the potted ZZ plants and multiple shoots of the raspberries. As I was driving home, Cyndie was reading up on how to take care of our newly repotted plant. We decided to put it in the front sunroom for now to give it time to settle in the new pot.
I’d like to see it turn toward the sunlight and have the soil firm up to give the stalks more stability before calling this a successful transplant. Then I hope to buddy it up with the tall Bird of Paradise on the sunnier half of the house.
I like the symmetry of our two rescued/repotted exotic plants growing alongside one another.
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Wondering If
While trimming the remaining grass around all the pine trees over the weekend, three things triggered a new hypothesis about our ongoing loss of red pines. I’m wondering if it might have something to do with girdling from the trees being root bound.
I did some searching to see if being root bound might contribute to the way so many of our red pines are coming out of the ground at about a 45° angle before eventually turning to grow straight up, but didn’t find any hint of that connection.
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Then, while writing to describe my latest discoveries to our regional DNR Forester, it struck me that the eighteen inches of heavy, wet snow that fell in May of 2013 tipped many of our trees, but not all of them. In fact, mainly the red pines leaned over. If they were planted without proper attention to the roots, well, a root bound tree would have a hard time standing straight under that kind of load in the wet ground.
While laboring to walk through the cut growth with the power trimmer on my shoulder, I stumbled over an old stump of a long-dead tree. I was curious about an obvious circular root growth, but just tossed it to the side.
Later, while trimming beneath pine branches, I caught a brief glimpse of a girdling root on one tree which triggered a memory of long ago, when we lost a tree in Eden Prairie to root girdling. It led me to go back and reclaim that old stump for a picture, finally thinking I might be on to something.
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It occurred to me that I should also take a picture of the girdling root I had just spotted on that live tree. I retraced my path to find it again, but to no avail.
I was hot, tired, sweaty, and covered with weeds and grass shrapnel. I didn’t have the energy or mental acuity to execute an intelligent search. I am confident it is out there somewhere, unless maybe it was just an optical illusion that my mind used to help guide me further along this theory I was concocting. I’ll allow for a possibility it was all in my head.
If I receive a response from our Forester that lends credence to my thinking, I’ll undertake a more organized research expedition through that grove of pines again.
I realized, in afterthought, that my tired searching was mainly focused on looking at the leaning red pines, in support of my hypothesis. Maybe the root I noticed had yet to cause a problem, and was on one of the trees that still looked just fine.
It all definitely has me wondering. Did these red pines have already compromised root systems when they were all planted? There are several stumps still in the back yard from trees I cut off at ground level after they died. I could always exhume those remains to collect a little more evidence.
Put that on the “someday” list. For now, I’m going to wait to see if our DNR Forester thinks my latest findings could possibly explain our red pines slowly dying, year after year.
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Relative Something 