Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Losing the Blue Spruce?



I don't know if you can see it well in the picture, but our blue spruce, which we planted about 25 years ago, have acquired a disease or fungus.

The trees are about 30 feet tall and have been beautiful additions to our yard. I have enjoyed them tremendously.

We noticed they were looking puny in late winter and at first thought it was the bitter cold, but after searching the internet we determined it was probably a fungus. We bought some stuff to spray on the trees and that seemed to help, but they are looking very scraggily. I'm afraid I'm going to lose these trees. We have four of them. Two look very bad; a third appears to be infected but not as badly as the other two, and one so far, fingers crossed, seems to be okay.

I love these trees and hate to think about cutting them down, but if they die we will of course have to. And then we will want to plant something else back. I like the evergreens because they give constant shade, but I would be afraid the fungus would still be there. So I don't know. We will have to wait and see.

As with the oak tree root fungus in the previous post, this appears to be caused by last year's overly wet weather. One of the insidious results of climate change, I fear, will be the changes in the forests. Whether we take note or not, Mother Nature certainly will.

4 comments:

  1. I have one blue spruce that I planted about 12 years ago. It has a lot of pale needles and I fear I will lose it. I've noticed a lot of evergreens along the roadways aren't doing well this year.

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  2. I love a Blue Spruce. I'm sad to see what is happening to yours.

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  3. A lot of coniferous trees and shrubs suffered the same fate as your spruce these last few years. We've lost a few trees on our block, and the evergreen shrubs in front of my front windows are also dead. They started tearing them out in the spring and never finished -- which, in my opinion, looks worse than the entire row of dead wood did. :-\

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  4. Climate change wreaks havoc in a lot of big and small ways. Too bad people don't pay attention.

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