Hello all! Please excuse me if this is not the place to post the following. I'm new here and totally clueless when it comes to gardening. Any help would be appreciated. I have a dwarf cedar or cypress growing in my front garden. It was planted 2-3 years ago and is dying. It has never really done well, but there has been a marked decline in its health this spring. After a bit of research, I'm thinking that there was a problem in the planting, either 1) the root ball was too dry on planting, 2) the cardboard "pot" it was in did not disintegrate properly or quickly enough or 3) the soil the tree was planted in was to clay-rich to allow the roots to grow. My question is: can I save this thing? I mean it looks pretty far gone, but there is still some green. I hope it isn't a total lost cause.. Thanks very much!
If you only have specks or small patches of green left, don't bother trying to keep it going. Be sure to perform an autopsy on the roots, see if you discover anything instructive. The optimum situation is if you can get away with bare-rooting at planting time, so that the roots are spread out in the same soil that is all through the whole bed - with no ties, field soil, potting soil or fiber pots between them and the fresh ground of the planting site. Especially when deformed (bound, circling, kinked etc.) roots are discovered at bare-rooting, and these are corrected the procedure may effectively turn the plant into a cutting, with extra care toward keeping it moist for a time after planting then being required. It would appear I lost a camellia to bare-rooting at planting this year but many other specimens I have handled this way have not died. And I have lost several others that failed to establish when planted with intact field soil rootballs, dwindled away over a period of years.
