Tropicals & Tender Perennials: Share your yard!, 0 by fauna4flora

fauna4flora wrote:
Laurel Oak is notorious for getting diseased and dying. The stump was here along with some other hurricane clean up, etc. Well, I don't like coming in and chopping everything up. Lots of reasons (man, we HAVE to get rid of the big pine tree in front of the house struck by lightning, but all the birds love to perch on it......it's gonna kill me to see it go), but my main reason is that we had a neighbor lose all of his pine trees when he brought in trucks and crews to cut down the dead ones. I mean, the living ones quickly died thereafter, too! So, one of the ways hurricanes kill pine trees is by slow death because the wind twists the tree and all the roots and supposedly they lose the relationship with the fungi that fix the nutrients. Anyway, every time they sawed up a piece of tree, BOOM! on the ground it fell, and I felt it inside the house- more disturbance. I know there is a lot of pine beetle factor, too, but all I can say is that we have totally dragged our feet on removing about 4 trees that really need to go and we haven't lost any other trees since the storms over 2 years ago. But, getting back to this laurel oak. I turned it (I turn everything, and I mean everything) into a planter! The sedums didn't take very well, but the bromeliads are doing great.