Question
I have 2 trees in my front yard that are 25ft high and 18 years old or more. I hired a man to do some yard work a few days ago. I had huge root growth coming up out the ground and asked him to trim it. He used my chain saw and cut out a LARGE 2FT STUMP/ROOT. Now all the leaves on them have turned brown/yellow and thousands have fallen in a day, like a show globe. Is my trees dead,now? I feel terrible over this. Please help. Thanks  so much.Also, we have huge flower bed around these 2 trees and my worker cleaned out around the trees and pulled hundreds of excess roots up to put in trash and new top soil was laid with weed control liner and then pine straw on top of that.

Answer
Sounds like between the cutting of main roots and the dogging of feeder roots the root system of the Tree was badly damaged. This damage will show up as foliage dying. There is not a whole lot that can be done. I would advice watering with about 1 inch of water per watering and do this every third day and see if the tree may produce more feeder roots. Put a pan under the tree and when the pan has 1 inch of water in it stop. I would say the chances are less than 50% that the tree will survive. The flower plants are also competing with the tree's roots for water and since the tree has lost so much of the root system it can not pick up enough water to keep the leaves alive.
You can check the outer branches starting near the end of the branch and scrape a small bit of bark off the branch and if the color under the bark is green the branch is still alive--if the color is brown the branch is dead.