Diagnosis for Dying Burning Bush
Okay an email here from Pam, and she says “I have four burning bushes about five feet tall, and for some reason this one started to turn red early, and now it looks like it’s dead. Not sure what to do, the other ones are thriving, Any suggestions?”
She sent the pictures, and it doesn’t look like that one’s gonna come back. Now what you can do though, take your thumbnail or the edge of a pruner blade and actually go inside the plant. Start at the tip of the branch and you’re gonna scratch it. If it’s green underneath, there is potential that it will reflush more leaves. So you want to fertilize it, water it well if the soil is dry.
If it’s not green at the very tip, move further down the branch towards the center of the plant, scratch it again. If it’s not green there, move further down and scratch it again. If you get to where there’s green wood, make the cut there, because anything that’s brown wood is not going to produce any new growth. Cut that off and you’ve got sunlight getting back to the part of the plant that’s still green.
To me that looks maybe even like chemical damage there. It’s all brown, it’s completely nuked, and for something like that to happen, that’s generally not gonna be an insect. That’s usually an environmental thing, something happened with the root system of the plant would be my guess.
Whether it was, you know, somebody cleaned a patio with an aggressive detergent, there’d be a lot of environmental questions I would ask them so if they ever want to stop up into the nursery, we’re gonna ask you a lot of questions about the environment that that plant is planted in and see if we can figure out maybe what happened, and why that was the only one that is acting like that.
What we can’t see there is the lay of the pitch of the ground, and so again if you were to clean up there, it looks like a brick patio behind it nearby. If there was something used as a cleaner on that, and that’s the lowest point, that one’s root system would be affected, where the other ones wouldn’t.
We would start to ask them, I’ve had people who had their siding cleaned on their house and the cleaners they used were damaging to the plant, so there’s just a lot of little things like that. We ask to try to figure out why, because burning bush are tough as nails.
When I was looking at the picture, you can see the leaves are fully formed, so the plant didn’t have the issue in the springtime. Something environmental had to happen to make that drastic of a change.
Bring the pictures in and then you can chat with folks and find out, but we hope we can help that be taken care of and if not, you just have to get a replacement.
Warning About Following Directions
One of the other things I’ve seen, I just want to mention this so people were thinking about it and aware of it. I had a guy come into the nursery not that long ago that had picked up some weed killer at a different place, and one, did not follow the instructions on how to mix it and use it, but two, did not realize the weed killer that he bought was a soil sterilant.
What that means is it will kill anything that’s growing in that soil, and nothing will grow back for nine months. So he used it on the cracks in his driveways, which makes sense, you don’t want anything growing there for any period of time. But instead of mixing it up in the liquid like it told him to in a sprinkling can, he dumped the concentrate on the cracks of the driveway. Well, the heavy rains came down, mixed it into the dilution rate that it should have been, and it washed down through a yard and killed a three-foot diameter oak tree that cost him thousands to have taken out.
Always, always, always, follow the instructions on the bottle. Now we can talk with you about how to properly apply or when to apply to be more effective, but we are never going to recommend anything but what these instructions say on the bottle. More is not better. Sometimes more frequency can be better, but never deviate from the instructions on the bottle. They’re there for a reason.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
