Why would one cedar in my hedge suddenly die?
It's a common scenario: You plant twenty cedars in a long hedge and for years, sometimes even decades, that hedge is perfectly healthy until one day you discover that a single cedar has died. Somehow that dead cedar is never located at the end of the row. No, the striking brown corpse is almost always located somewhere midway along the hedge where it stands out like a stop sign.
There is no one reason why a single cedar suddenly up and dies, but often when only one plant is affected, it's because something wasn't done quite right when the hedge was originally planted.
If you bought your cedars in burlap balls which had twine tied around the stem, you would have been well advised to cut that twine at the time of planting. If you didn't, you ran the risk that the plant might grow faster than the twine disintegrated, resulting the plant slowly strangling.
If you bought your cedars in plastic containers, one or more of them could have been rootbound and you would’ve needed to slash the roots circling around the inside of the pot before planting the cedar in the ground. If you didn't, then the plant's roots may have girdled.
This same problem can crop up when cedars are planted in fibre pots. In theory, fibre pots break down and the plant roots grow through the decaying material to establish themselves in the surrounding soil. In practice, nurseries often recommend that you slash the fibre pot vertically in several places in order to ensure that the roots can break free in a reasonable timeframe.
Then there is the issue of planting depth. If a cedar was planted in the ground deeper than the soil surface in the pot, then its roots could have become compressed, causing the plant to slowly suffocate.
It's also possible to be too kind to your plants. If you augmented the soil in the planting hole before you put the cedar in, thinking that you should give the plant better soil than what's naturally found in your yard, then sometimes plants like the augmented soil a bit too much and refuse to establish roots in outside the planting hole, resulting in girdled roots and ultimately death.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at vanessa@gardenmuse.ca.
Originally published in the Creston Valley Advance.
