Arbor Arboretum Arbutus Carborundum
Trees are once again on my mind at the moment. In the same way that I felt compelled last year to hire a consulting horticulturalist to teach me what I didn’t know about gardening (his message can be distilled to two words – MORE MULCH), I have just hired and spent two hours with a consulting arborist. I found him much more professional and credible than the horticulturalist, though they did share a common trait of not wanting to provide much in writing. I sense that their hesitation with the written word was less about the normal business concern about having their words used against them in some future civil action, and more about them being men of nature and not men of the desk. This particular arborist, the only certified consulting arborist to be found in Escondido in the annals of the American Society of Consulting Arborists, was an interesting fellow. To begin with, I went this route of a consulting arborist because every tree service you find (and there are lots of them in this territory) is profiled as a guy who was not afraid of heights, was willing to shimmy up tall palm trees to prune dead leaf matter from them, and yet had enough ambition to hire other immigrants (mostly) with similar lack of fear of falling. The ones who managed to not fall to earth and had a smidge of ambition, founded tree service companies and their goal in life is to denude every tree in Southern California of as many branches as possible for a fee.
This is where I must digress for a moment and merge my arborist and horticultural interest, arenas that seem mostly to be in competition for the affections and share of wallet of homeowners like me. When tree services get the mandate to prune and trim trees, they often do so invoking the fear of wildfires and the need for homeowners to be prudent enough to reduce the actively available flammable dry vegetation matter around their homes. That does make some sense even to the most cynical of homeowners. That naturally means that the observant homeowner will insist that all that pruned material be disposed of by the tree service provider. I am a homeowner with a hillside property which has several points on its downhill periphery where I can throw excess plant matter off a proverbial cliff into the ravine, which happens to be owned by my Nepalese neighbor. He has eleven acres, most of which is useless ravine acreage that he is smart enough to not traverse for fear of encountering all manner of wildlife that is better left undisturbed. Therefore, I have little fear of being caught red-handed like Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant, dumping material and being accused of littering. But I do have enough imagination to see in my mind’s eye, a wildfire that starts from a passing motorist on the 15 tossing a cigarette into the roadside dry grass and watching a wildfire roar up my ravine and gain steam from all the dried prunings I might have dumped over that shallow cliff edge. So, instead, I like most homeowners, insist that a tree service remove all trimmings.
They know this program well enough that they all own a giant wood-chipper (think of a big version of the Fargo wood-chipper, without the gore) and a shrouded cart to hold all the finely chipped plant matter that can be carted off premises. Now, finely chipped plant matter equals mulch and this is where the arbor rubber meets the horticultural road, so to speak. Arborists want to eliminate plant pruning matter and horticulturalists want to find mulch. Seems like a match made in heaven and for those more parsimonious homeowners who are looking for a bargain, they can easily find tree service guys that will gladly avoid dumping fees by leaving a load of chipped plant matter on their curb at no charge. Since mulch and its related trucking fees can run from $3 to $70 per cubic yard, and a typical residential yard can swallow up 100 yards in no time whatsoever, this can represent a meaningful cost saving. The downside is that all mulch is not created equally. Ignoring the candy wrappers in the mulch mix, there is palm mulch (not generally good for acidic reasons) and all sorts of variations of the stuff. I myself prefer the fragrance and look of cedar bark mulch, which tends towards the more expensive. My neighbor Winston, on the other hand, not only prefers the cheaper stuff, but is willing to take the even less expensive stuff that his supplier doses with large quantities of pig shit. On the surface, that sounds very organic and healthy for plants, right? But wait, you just know pig farmers are dying to find someplace to put all the pig shit they generate and they don’t want to pay dumping fees either, so this has to be a value added business model for the mulch purveyor. Winston feels it adds to his garden and who am I to say otherwise. What I do know is that the one time I subcontracted to take 5 yards of the stuff off his hands, Kim complained that the place was starting to smell like Uncle Hubert’s pig farm, so never again.
This brings us back to the interface between arborist and horticulturalist. Even if the horticulturalist likes the pig shit program in his mulch, I assure you that the arborist will not. For every mulch kudo the horticulturalist threw at me, my arborist warned me to keep soil and anything that turns into soil quickly (like organic mulch…oh, say, like mulch spiked with pig shit) away from the base of my trees. The arborists version of gospel is that you simply must keep the base of tree trunks free of excess soil and plants for two reasons. The first is that you want to eliminate plant-based competition at that critical juncture of the trunk and the earth. Secondly, and most importantly, the roots of the tree and how they are allowed to start at that trunk/earth juncture, determine the health of the tree more than anything else. Roots should be slightly visible at the trunk base flare because they can then spread outward and do not risk strangling the tree by getting wound around the trunk in a deleterious manner. I have perhaps forty trees on my property overall (I’m including the full range from a small Crepe Myrtle to four large Ficus trees on our northern boundary) and pretty much all of them except the Ficus trees got red-flagged by the arborist as either having been planted too low (always plant above grade…who knew?) or having too many competing plants at their base or too much soil and soil-trending mulch around their trunk. He was particularly concerned that I free up the flare roots of my Arbutus (Irish Strawberry tree) and my prized Queensland Bottle Tree. So guess what my to do list in the garden looks like now? What was a mulch obsession has now turned into a tree root freedom obsession.
I worked for two summers at the Cornell arboretum, which used to be called The Plantations, but that name was deemed Un-woke, so it was changed to Cornell Botanic Gardens or the F.R. Newman Arboretum (fundraising always being a university imperative). The point is, I learned my gardening and arboretum skills at the center of the plant-growing universe and came away with little or no awareness of mulch and root freedom needs. I am now duly enlightened and plan to find the blend that works for my property the best. I was pleased to hear from the arborist that my large cedar bark mulch was the best mulch because it degrades to soil the slowest (score one point for Rich and his nose and take one point away from Winston and his pig shit).
My consulting arborist was a stickler for lots of things. He wouldn’t go afield with me until I put on a hat and took a bottle of hydrating water. One look at his sliced up nose told me he had good reasons for his caution with the sun. But he also texted me after his visit to proclaim that once I had freed my bottle tree’s base, he would, at no added cost, come to inspect the work and bring his arborist friend from the Big Tree Project to measure my bottle tree. He consults for Balboa Park and says their big Queensland Bottle Tree is about the same size as mine and that mine most likely qualifies to be listed as a Big Tree in the record books. That seems like a worthy prize for all my arboreal efforts, so I have done the deed of replanting all the fountain grass from the bottle tree base and now await my reward for my grinding (carborundum) efforts. Hence, arbor arboretum arbutus carborundum. Don’t let the pig shit purveyors grind you and your arbutus down.