I recently found my Lileeanne's Jewel badly scorch from a late watering. All my other container maples are on a longer 3-4 day water schedule and this new maple sadly needed it sooner... Is there anything I can do to help save this? The leafs are scorched but the branches still look ok. I've heard of defoliating the scorched leafs, will that help in my case?
Hi Connor, yours is not the only one that is looking like this atm. Here in the UK trees are defoliating rapidly due to the drought. But they should recover for next year. The one thing to remember is not over water now. The reduced leaves means they don't need it. So just enough to keep the roots moist. As far as recovering this season. It might be a bit late for new leaves now. Those crispy ones will drop naturally, but you can remove them, leaving the petioles on and you might and I mean 'Might' get some new ones. As you say the branches look fine, so I would put it down to experience and look forward to some Autumn colour and a new start in Spring.
This is probably the single best piece of advice to give in this circumstance. It's a very common mistake to kill maples by over-watering following leaf scorch and defoliation. If possible, put the pot into the shade for now. I have a few coming back in now, but most won't. It won't make any difference for the tree whether you cut the petioles (leaf stalks) or just leave the tree to get on with it. If this just happened, it will probably be better off to just go dormant, rather than having to make a whole new set of buds at the end of the season. I took the picture for another thread, but lots of maples here look like this 'Little Green Star'. I think there will be heavy losses from this drought, though hopefully this one will survive, many others are completely bare.
Quite true. But further, normal abscission is an excellent indicator of the tree being alive. It won't happen if it is dead.
When the leaves of one of my trees have turned brown, I wait a couple of days, than pass my hand down the branch : if most of the leaves fall, it means new buds are forming. But cutting out the leaves that are dry allows more light, and air, inside the structure of the tree, so I usually remove the ones that are 80% burned. Here, rain is coming after weeks of drought, so that's what here I would do.
