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| Picture sent by reader of the Carolina Cherry Laurel |
Q. One of my Carolina cherry trees has some branches with brown
leaves and the branches were easily broken off.
I have attached a picture of one of the branches. There is an area of the main trunk, about
halfway up the tree, which is very black.
Carolina cherry or that they don’t look very good. The majority of the reasons
why this plant struggles here is because it is native to the southeastern
United States where the soils are rich and moist. They will struggle here if
they do not receive TLC. The other problem may be where they are planted.
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| Closeup of the trunk. This is usually due to sunburn on the trunk due to planting in very hot locations in the yard and leaf loss that allows direct sunlight to damage the trunk. |
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| Leaf drop of Carolina Cherry Laurel. In this case the cement and bricks surrounding the plant could poise some problems. |
Your
Carolina cherry laurel most likely has been damaged by the intense sunlight of
our desert Southwest. When damaged by strong sunlight, we see limb and branch
dieback accompanied by leaf drop.
Often times this damage is black
with brittle limbs and bark that peels. Frequently the tops of these trees will
die as well. They tend to look very
sparse in our climate and soils.
this plant is not a southwestern US native, we have to be careful with it here.
When planting it, the soil must be enriched with compost at the time of
planting and the surface of the soil should be covered with wood mulch, not
rock mulch.
struggle in very hot locations. This includes the south and west exposures of
the landscape particularly close to the very hot walls. They perform better if
clustered with other plants with similar soil and water requirements.
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| Same CCL as above but showing one is performing better than the other when growing under similar circumstances. It is possible the one on the left will do the same thing over time. It is also possible there could be some root disease problems due to the cement and possible overwatering and/or collar rot disease. |
They may
develop yellow leaves which would be corrected by applying an appropriate iron
fertilizer. The one I always recommend is the iron chelate EDDHA. It is stable
when applied to the soil regardless of the alkalinity. This is not true of
other iron fertilizers.