Question

Trees   Hi Melissa,

I planted a row of evergreen trees in my backyard last fall. They started off great, and even through a very hot summer in Alabama, never showed much sign of distress. Until a few days ago. Out of nowhere, I notice that three of the trees at the end of one row turned almost completely brown. And now the tree next to those three is half-way brown. I'm worried some disease hit the first one, and it is now going down the row. I've attached a picture.  You'll notice the one on the left is of the first three trees on the row. The second is looking back across the rest of the row, and shows how the 4th tree is now turning brown as well. Any ideas about what is going on? And what can I do to prevent the whole row from being wiped out? Thank you!

Answer
Dear Josh, I'm glad you included a picture.  While there are several diseases that affect evergreens, most of them don't cause much damage until the plants are much older.  The one exception would be spider mites which can be diagnosed by shaking a branch over a white sheet of paper and seeing if anything moves.  In that case you could spray with NEEM or Kelthane or something that is approved for spider mites.  However, as I am going through this same terrible summer, I am pretty sure that your trees have burned up from the heat.  New plantings are the most affected, but I have seen so many plants just die off this summer.  I have even seen large old magnolias go from green to brown in a week.  You can try to keep water on it but you won't know for certain if they will survive until next spring or they become brittle.  Oh, there is one other thing that could have caused this problem, but fortunately it doesn't happen too often.  Occasionally nursery plants will have severely cut back roots which causes them to have many more problems than usual.  This is caused by bad growers.  The way to find that out would be to dig one up and you will see large roots cut back.  It happens sometimes with evergreens, but the place I see this most often is in those rosemary plants that are cut to make Christmas trees.  They are very cute, but if they were cut to fit the pot the plant usually dies very soon.  Your trees probably just died from being new plantings and the heat.  You can replant early next year, and unless next summer is worse than this one, you should be successful. Sorry I don't have better news.  Melissa