What to Do About a Brown Spot on an Arborvitae Shrub?

The first question comes from Anne. She says, ‘I have a bowling ball arborvitae that was just planted this spring. It developed a brown patch. I trimmed the patch somewhat and I watered it heavily. Is there anything I can do to save it?’

Honestly, I mean, that’s all you can do. What you just did is trim out that dead. The arbs, they will do that sometimes. You’ll get those brown spots. That’s all you can really do. You can cut out that spot and try to fertilize it.

Hopefully it kind of bounces back a little bit, but it is a common thing with arbs that you get those brown spots sometimes. Now, you know, if it’s on the outside, it’s a different story. You want to trim it out, but like internally with arbs, they naturally kind of have that brown on the inside because they’re not getting hit by the sun.

Now, if it’s with bowling balls, it’s noticeable. They have a finer leaf. So what she did was all you can really do. Cut it out, fertilize it. I mean, try to save it in the spring. You definitely don’t want to fertilize now. Things are going to sleep. When they go dormant, you don’t want to fertilize it because it can bring it out of that dormancy and that’s obviously not good.

Now a bowling ball arborvitae, they’re really cool. They’re smaller. They are kind of like a bowling ball. They’re very round like a bowling ball. If you want kind of like a, I mean, I got two of them in front of my house, like my front porch. They get probably about four or five feet sometimes. Probably about three, four feet wide. So they do get big and there’s other options that are a little bit smaller. There’s one called like a tater tot that stays like a foot and a half to two feet tall and wide. There’s one that’s like the bowling ball, but it’s called a fire chief and has an orange and red, fall color on it.

So there’s a lot of cool different options. If you need an arborvitae shrub that stays a little bit smaller, it gets a little bit bigger, but they’re really cool placement pieces for the front of your house. They’re really, really nice shrubs. Because usually people think of the arbs that are really tall and thin.

I do notice too, sometimes on the smaller ones like that with boxwood and arbs, they have a scent like that. Sometimes dogs, male dogs, will mark them and that is what that brown patch comes from. It may have been wind, but I have seen that a lot. So that’s kind of one thing to keep in mind. You can kind of tell too, if it’s like a localized area that’s like that big, it’s probably dog pee.

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