Hi, I am a new member and have checked the boards to see if anyone else has asked these questions, I couldn't see anything and I hope you can perhaps answer them. Firstly I see that many horse chesnut trees around Vancouver are looking really sick and at least one I know has been chopped down. Is this due to the fungal? problem I have read about that has killed about 10% of the UK chesnuts? What can be done about it? It is awful to see, I have never seen sick chesnut trees before. Secondly, a beautiful huge old tree (not sure what it is), one of several on W 11th between Discovery and Courtenay has recently died. It is directly in front of a plot where a new house has been built and major digging has gone on. It may be a coincidence but is there any place to report this, so that it can be determined whether the building work was responsible? Thanks.
No significant die-off of Horse-chestnuts here. There is a leaf-mining insect (Cameraria ohridella) that has recently colonised Britain from Europe, but while unsightly it doesn't cause significant harm, and a Phytophthora disease that causes a tarry canker, but it doesn't kill many trees.
Chestnut is used for Castanea and horse chestnut for Aesculus. If you read about a problem with chestnuts it may not have been in reference to Aesculus. Scorching of horse chestnut and buckeye leaves during periods of low humidity during summer is common, perhaps this is what you are seeing.
There's been quite a lot about this in the papers http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/07/23/eachestnut123.xml It seems to be confined to the south.
Yes, that article in the Telegraph was the one that I had read. I asked an arborist about the chestnut tree that had been felled on UBC campus that I mentioned yesterday and it was actually root damage from construction work 3 years ago that had killed it. And I guess that maybe the answer for all the trees I mentioned. There was a huge amount of roadwork round here 3-4 years and the dead trees may well be the result of that.
