Salt Cedar

I just purcased 6 Salt Cedars (Tamarix ramosissima 'rubra') with the intention of putting them in a row, along one side of my driveway. The attached cards say "Cut back in late winter" and the American Horticultural Society's encyclopedia says to "cut young plants nearly to the ground" I am not sure if these would qualify as "young plants", they are 3-4 feet tall and their main trunks are about as big around as my thumb.
Does anyone have any experience with these? I need some guidance.
blpender

You might want to do some research on this plant before planting it--it's highly invasive in some areas, and even if it's not invasive near you, it will increase the salinity of the soil which will make it hard to grow other things around it.

JoanJ posted a good background on it in the comments section of the PlantFiles entry if you want to learn a little more
http://davesgarden.com/pf/go/82732/

I have Summer Glow. I'm sure they would regrow from cutting back, but they don't need it that often. I could see them needing it to keep the older woody growth down. My major concern with shrubs that need to be cut back so often is all the old stumps around it and how it looks.

just let them grow, you will eventually need to take out the old dead wood.
yes there is a political controversy out west about them being invasive. not so in my area.
they are very beautiful. salt in the soil?? well i have a 12ft rose of sharon growing right next to it perhaps crowding it, must like salt. lol i don't find it slowing anything else down.

I'm surprised you found it, i was going to get more and the local nurseries quit selling them. I found out finally what it was and did some research and found out that congress recently spent millions of dollars to get rid of it.
the lowdown is, is that it has taken the place of the dying cottonwoods which are disappearing because too many people are moving in the desert and using the water along the rivers and so the salt cedar aka tamarix gets the blame.

I don't think there's really any controversy--they are highly invasive out here! Maybe the question of whether they're a problem or not is controversial in other parts of the country, but here it's a pretty sure thing. On the salinity, I wonder if maybe this isn't as much of a problem in rainier areas of the country because the rain washes the salts out of the soil and they can't accumulate to the point where it's toxic to other plants?

Rose of Sharon / Hibiscus syriacus is salt tolerant

I've read all I can find, and I suppose like everything else, any plant can be invasive if the conditions are right for it. I probably pull a thousand elm saplings out of my garden beds each year, and one would not consider an elm tree invasive.
I'm a little confused on the salt issue. I can see a plant being problematic if it's growing in the coastal plain, but I doubt there is enough salt this far inland to be a factor. If I'm looking at this incorrectly, I would appreciate someone explaining it to me.
They are still sitting in their pots, it's been too hot to plant anyhow.
blpender

An invasive plant is, by definition, one that is invading, i.e., did not occur naturally in an area but is coming in from outside. Therefore, native plants cannot be invasive.

On the salt issue, Tamarix species are highly efficient salt accumulators, with wide-spreading, deep roots. They will take up salt from deep down (e.g. soaked-in road salt from last winter and previous winters), translocate it to their leaves, and then drop it onto the soil surface with their leaf litter. They have evolved this strategy to kill off competing plants that are less salt tolerant, and thereby increase their dominance of the environment. It doesn't need a lot of salt to do this, road salt is enough.

Resin

I dunno Resin, that seems like a narrow definition of invasive. I often hear the term, "invasive exotic" and think that it's appropriate, not redundant.

Where's Equilibrium when you need her?

blpender i am similar to you, as i also have large elms that really put out the seedlings
sometimes, but the tamarix i have which i presume to be quite old, as it is about 12-15 ft high. it hasn't produced any seedlings. as a matter of fact the rose of sharon has put out a seedling that is growing and flowering right into the tamarix. whatever salt it has spit out hasn't made any difference to the grass, weeds or rose of sharon next to it. in our areas there is no problem at all and they are very beautiful. could be that there is no salt here to bring up?
as for weeds, invasives etc., my Kansas weed book lists the state flower of Kansas as a weed! and it goes on to say, "one of these, H. tuberosus, is taken into cultivation for the edible tubers, called "jerusalem artichokes."

Going back to what invasive means--I think technically it is when a plant moves into a natural area and starts taking the place of plants that belonged there. So by definition, a native plant can't be invasive because it was supposed to be there, although you have to be careful how you use the word "native"--this is a big country and many plants are only truly "native" in a small area.

There can be things that reseed like crazy in your garden or grow rampantly, even to the point of you being sick of them and wanting to get rid of them, but if you put them out in a natural area where they don't get the supplemental water, etc that you provide in the garden, they might not do very well. A plant like that would be aggressive but not invasive (many people see something running rampant through their garden and automatically label it invasive, but it may not be).

Conversely, there might be a plant where it doesn't grow all that fast and you can pull up the seedlings from your garden and keep it under control fairly easily, but if the seeds land in a natural area where there's nobody to pull up the seedlings, they may grow, and reproduce, and eventually take over that whole area. That would be invasive.

And of course there are always the wonderful plants that are both aggressive in the garden AND invasive, the worst of both worlds!

Let's say that I was displace from my home by bandits. Since it is my home, I would not be able to "invade" to take it back since it is my rightful place? The sentence, "The bandits to my home so I invaded it and took it back." seems okay to me.

I was only trying to define it in terms of plants :-)

But in the case of the bandits, I'd say they were invading your property, and you taking it back later isn't invading, it's taking back what was rightfully yours. I believe that "invading", whether it's plants or people, always implies someone/something trying to take over something that's not theirs or where they don't belong, in a way that's not very nice to the people/things that did belong in that place.

Hmm...............still not with you but I think it'll be okay to agree to disagree. Thanks for the debate!

Maybe the dictionary definition of "invade" would help? You really can't invade your own house, probably lots of other things you could call it but it's not invading.
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/invading

Invasive is relative term until proven elsewise. I have never seen any tamarisk seedlings, I have tons of seedling from my neighbors smoketree and seedlings from one of my ninebarks and have never heard of them displacing natives.
I haven't noticed any problems with plants growing around mine - everything gets watered as needed though.

I don't think that the tamarix is invasive in your area. It is invasive out here, but it's not in other parts of the country. No matter where it is though it'll do the salt concentration thing, but in some climates if you get a lot of rain that may matter less than it would elsewhere.

On the invasiveness of certain species of tamarisk...

http://www.montana.edu/wwwpb/pubs/mt9710.html

I'm always very saddened to see, whenever we travel to the SW desert states that tamarisk has taken over entire watercourses, at the expense of native vegetation. I realize how difficult it must be to eradicate, when, even where the desire exists, such as in national parks, the battle appears to be a losing one.
So, now I see that certain tamarisk species are invasive in Montana too... nothing new, but apparently known since 1960. So much for its invasiveness being controlled by climate...