Hi, This is the first time I have tried this so please bear with me. I have 2 Japanese Red Maples. One has leaves and is beautiful and the other has no leaves on the braches but some sprouting at the bottom of the trunk. These are young trees with a trunk around 2" wide. I looks like it has buds but they are dry and the branches are plyable so it doesn't look dead. I have a lawn service and I am afraid they might have gotten over spray on the tree. Any thoughts?
Most likely a grafted tree, if so sprouting from the bottom is a bad sign. Are the leaves on the new shoots different from what grows above? If so the rootstock is growing, possibly because the top is no longer viable. Try scratching a small branch on the top. If it's still green, you might want to wait before acting. -E
Yes the leaf color is not the red but more gold. I have checked the branches and they are still plyable but I will do the scratch this afternoon.
Grafted Japanese maples are rather prone to blighting off, web sites with garden forums now have multiple posts asking why a Japanese maple is partly bare, shriveled up last year, and so on. An experienced party has reported on this site that there were some growers that were not keeping Pseudomonas (bacterial blight) out of their Japanese maple stock - and that this was manifesting after plants were sent out to retailers, purchased and planted by final consumers. I have certainly had the same kind of outcome myself in recent years, both a 'Bloodgood' and a 'Shaina' dying away soon after being planted. These both looked clean when purchased (site is kind of a cold air trap, with more mist and frost than adjacent areas - plants could also have been infested from the outside, after planting).
