Backyard Wisdom - March/April 2022
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

I’m sorry to say it, but we had to take this tree down for safety reasons. But, it has a story to tell us, from the inside out!

This Norway Maple landed as a “whirly bird” seed on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Lake Forest in 1960. I counted the annual rings as best I could. I guess everyone knows how to count the tree rings to determine the age of a tree. In April 2019 in our Wisdom From The Trees article Lesley and I talked about how trees grow and how they heal. Also Aldo Leopold, in his famous book, The Sand County Almanac explained the history in the rings of a tree.

Mother Nature’s Moment - March/April 2022
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

This week, like many times in the spring of the year, I was asked to visit a client property to examine some large Arborvitae to see why they were not doing well. The client thought that she needed a price for fertilizing these “stressed trees”.

It has been a rainy week after many months of drought in the Chicago area. As I stepped into the back yard I noticed I was stepping onto completely sodden soil. My shoes were making sucking noises while walking the length of the lawn to the back property line where the big Arborvitae were planted. It was easy to see from a distance that the area around the trees was about an inch or two under water. I managed to get under the trees and check out the soil with my soil probe. No surprise that the heavily clay like soil was totally saturated to about a foot below the surface.

Backyard Wisdom - January/February 2022
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

Driving through Deerfield a few months ago I stopped to take a picture of the above (left) pictured declining Norway Spruce. Almost every day we get asked, “What is killing my trees and what can you spray on them to save them?” When I drove up to these sick trees my thoughts were similar. Is this being caused by a disease or by a bug?

Backyard Wisdom - June/July 2021
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

I got a call from a client this spring (2021) asking me to check her Beech tree this summer and spray any caterpillars that might kill it. This Beech is her favorite tree. I told her that I would do that and not to worry because caterpillars on Beech trees are normal, natural and healthy. She replied with enthusiasm, “Don’t tell me that! I don’t want my tree to die!”

Mother Nature’s Moment - July 2021
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

It has been a “good” year for funky leaf galls, or a bad year, I guess, depending on how you look at it. Galls are “abnormal vegetable growths caused by various agents, such as, insects, nematodes, fungi, bacteria, viruses, chemicals and or mechanical injury”. When our clients ask about these funny bumps on their tree leaves, I usually stop at the short explanation that they are completely harmless to the tree and normally caused by beneficial insects that lay their eggs in the leaf tissue which causes the strange growth they are seeing.

Backyard Wisdom - May 2021
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

This White Oak branch has been hanging in there for about 80 years so we can assume that it is pretty strong. Growing in Old School Forest Preserve in Lake County, IL, this tree is in its natural state, but what if it was growing in your landscape? Would you worry about this branch falling? Many homeowners worry, and for what seems like good reason; this branch is low, long and heavy. We wonder, how can it possibly not break? Because of that, in many landscapes, all of the beautiful low branches on our trees are cut off.

Mother Nature’s Moment - May 2021
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

These last two years we have all learned about our deep needs as humans to be together. We were not meant to live in isolation, to spend long hours, days, months with very little meaningful interaction with others. Going about our days behind masks, unable to even read the cues that all of us take for granted in our unspoken communications with one another. We have been diminished by all of this and knowingly or unknowingly are in grief around all we have lost.

Backyard Wisdom - February | March 2021
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

With snow on the landscape and temperatures in the cold range you're probably not thinking about trimming your deciduous (non-evergreen) shrubs. Still, now and until the leaves come back in May/June is a really great time to trim them. I’m going to give you easy to follow, step by step directions.

But first let me explain why.

Mother Nature’s Moment - February | March 2021
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

Almost every month we come to you with new information about trees. This month, and on and off in the months to come, I am going to try to introduce you to some of our good friends in the tree family.

The best way to learn the names of trees is to “get to know them”. The same way you get to know a new friend. First you learn their names, then you can remember their name when you see them and recognize their face and hair and the color of their eyes. Then, as you get to know them really well, you can tell what they look like from a long distance away, because of the way they walk or talk or have unique expressions or characteristics. It all becomes very familiar to you. You even learn to recognize them no matter what they are wearing or if they have had a hair cut. You KNOW them!

“What is the matter with my Boxwood?” Lesley and I have been asked this question much too often in the last few years. Boxwood (Buxus sempervrens, microphylla, etc.) have many troubles, for example: Leaf Minors, Leaf Curlers, Spider Mites, Psyllid, Volutella and Phytophora fungal blights, Nematodes, too much water on overhead sprinklers, or too little water, winter damage, frozen soils, heavy soils, Boxwood Decline and most recently, Boxwood Blight. None of these by themselves are the cause of most of the Boxwood dieback. We can go through all kinds of soil and tissue samples, fertilizers, fungicide and insecticide sprays and still be missing the main cause.

Mother Nature’s Moment - January 2021
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

A decade ago when we were first visiting our daughter’s-in-law family home in the mountains of Austria we had the privilege of witnessing life on a European farm first hand. While there we watched her young cousins on the mountain alm1 playing, half naked in the pond where the pigs were bathing too. It was one of the first of many real life lessons, since, on the value of biodiversity, and the role of microbes in developing our human immune systems.

Backyard Wisdom - December 2020
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

Most of us have had a lot more time to be observing our own back yard this year. In your wanderings have you noticed little 1/2 inch mounds of soil often with pencil sized holes right in the center? What you’re looking at is the work of 250,000 native earth worms as they farm your back yard soil. What are they doing? They’re coming up to the surface, grabbing leaves, pulling them into their burrows and eating them.

Mother Nature’s Moment - December 2020
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

Thirty years ago when our sons were in grade school they had a classmate that had to flee, with his mom, out west to a place above tree line in order to not suffer horrendous neurological symptoms due to the abundant use of toxic herbicides and pesticides in our suburban landscapes. This was not a very sustainable situation.

Backyard Wisdom - November, 2020
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

I didn't rake any leaves in my landscape this fall. I never rake leaves. That’s not because I have someone else do it, nor is it because I’m lazy, (though that point can be debated). It’s because leaf raking is a waste of my time and a waste of the fuel that powers our back yard ecosystem.

Mother Nature’s Moment - November 2020
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

This time of year the question of “How can we tell what is alive or dead?” is a frequent one. It is so second nature to us that we often forget to explain to you how we tell if a branch is alive or dead in the middle of the “dormant” season. Let’s start by talking about what we mean when we say: “dormant season”. In the ‘olden days’, our understanding of what deciduous trees were doing in the winter was intuitive but inaccurate. Trees that lose their leaves in the autumn, do slow down their processes in order to survive the long journey around the sun. However, to say that trees go dormant during the winter is a bit misleading.

Backyard Wisdom - September 2020
by: Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Arborist

Forty-five years ago in Agronomy class I wondered what was so important about soil structure? Those of us in the plant world know that soil is made up of various ratios of sand, silt, clay and organic matter. We can test it for plant essential minerals like, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc. But what exactly is soil structure and why is it so important?

Mother Nature’s Moment - September 2020
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

Dr Alex Shigo, the father of modern arboriculture, once said: “Trimming your trees is one of the best things you can do for them, if you do it properly, and one of the worst things you can do, if you do it improperly.”

For a multitude of reasons we are seeing a huge number of trees that have been over trimmed or trimmed improperly. So what does that mean or what does it look like?

Summer 2020 - Backyard Wisdom
by Gilbert A Smith, ISA Board Certified Master Arborist

Right now, in our forest preserves and our landscapes we see the evidence of too much water causing our trees to die from drought. Let me explain. Trees, like every organism, need to breathe. Of course, we all know that during the day tree leaves use CO2 and give off O2, through the miracle of photosynthesis. What we may not realize is that trees, like us, respire all the time using O2 and giving off CO2. They don't have mouth parts, but they do have openings called stomates in their leaves, lenticels and ray cells in their stems and roots through which they ”breathe”.

Summer 2020 Mother Nature’s Moment
by: Lesley Bruce Smith, ISA Certified Arborist

It seems very counter intuitive that browning and dead leaves could be caused by too much water, but I wish I knew how many times in the last several weeks I have had to say to clients…”This is a problem that has been caused, or made worse, by cool, very wet spring weather.”

by: Board Certified Master Arborist, Gilbert A Smith
Backyard Wisdom - April/May 2020

Fifty years ago when I was a young “tree skinner” Yes, that’s what they called us and with good reason. I was taught to paint all of the cuts that I made with tree tar. That was the measure of a good job. My father would say, “I saw a lot of ‘white eyes’ in the trees you trimmed today.” What an insult! “White eyes” were the newly exposed round tree cuts that looked like eyes on the branches.