I have an arbutus that is losing leaves & branches in very strange way. It is about 15 feet high x 12 and about 6 deep, and pruned into a fairly rectangular shape. On the left side facing, the leaves and branches are drying up and dying but the dead parts only go about 2 feet in, and the rest of the tree is mostly fine, except for a few dead clusters of leaves here and there. There is a strip of dying clusters of leaves along the bottom as well. It's just weird that the dead area is so highly geometric, and confined to a two-foot section on the left side and sporadically along the bottom. There was a holly tree right beside the dead strip and I removed the holly today in case it might be a stressor. Is that possible? I have never pruned this arbutus and left it pretty much as we found it when we moved here 5 years ago. Is the lack of pruning part of the problem? The leaves are turning dark red, then brown, and drying up and falling off. There don't appear to be any bugs and a couple of the living leaves have exactly three small brown spots so it doesn't look diseased. I checked for fungus and haven't found anything. This last winter, we had a couple of unusually long cold snaps - the blooms on the rhodo that had formed were killed off. Would the arbutus be that sensitive as well? Many thanks for help you all can give!
Am also on Vancouver Island Hearsay is that there is a blight affecting Arbutus here Many trees affected in same way, half tree dead etc Neighbor had to remove magnificent specimen for same reason Any input much appreciated
Attached are 3 photos - hope these help. I had already started pruning yesterday and took off most of the dead stuff along the bottom and some of the lower left corner, so it looks lopsided. Once the die-off starts, it seems to go quickly. Some leaves that were still red but alive yesterday are moribund today, and there are some more obvious patches developing in other areas. Not sure if pruning heavily will save the rest of it, but you do what you can, and maybe this will help. I am not the greatest at pruning though.
Boy do I feel silly - thank you so much, I looked up some photo samples and it appears to be Photinia fraseri. (Please let me know if you think that is also not quite correct! Previous owners didn't leave a map of plants in yard and that would have helped.) A couple of years ago a friend had said it looked like an arbutus, so I got online to google and found Photinia arbutifolia & it looked somewhat like that, and I made the mental leap from there, right over the precipice. It also looked somewhat like some *real* arbutus in the neighbourhood ... anyway, thank you so much for that. There is a fair degree of soil compaction and that might be part of problem. Clearly, it does need regular pruning to keep air circulating and promote new growth, and I haven't kept that up enough. This bush has never flowered nor has it produced fruit in 5 years. At this point, would it be a good idea to prune the dead areas now in August or wait until later in the fall? I still am unsure why the bush is dying but I suspect it might actually be root rot + overwatering. This area has heavy precipitation (mostly rain) in winter and sometimes drought in summer.
