April 30, 2017

The Sick Birch

The tale of a tree from Summer 2007: ""Like other things in this city, this country, and this era, "the solution" to "the problem" is not exactly crisp and effective, but it sounds nice and feels good."

asickbirch.jpgIn mid-July the tree in my front yard is losing its leaves. It's a weeping birch some fifty feet high. It doesn't so much shade the house as stand guardian to it. On its trunk the black and white patches have merged together and long ebony tendrils of branches dangle down festooned with dark forest-green leaves like emerald fireworks frozen above the lawn.

The shade pool from the tree covers my neighbor's yard to the north. He sits under it on his lawn on hot days. He's a quiet neighbor and a nice man. Speaks two languages and has a few political ideas which are a bit too socialist for my taste, but it's Seattle and he doesn't push them too hard so we live in harmony. He has a nice little house and spends a lot of time keeping it tidy.

The shade from my tree doesn't quite reach my neighbor to the south who admires it much more than I admire his fence, which is old and full of holes. Often time's he's told me how he wishes he could lounge in the shade, but he'd have to move his chair onto my lawn to do so. He's hinting about permisson. I suppose I could issue an open invitation for him to enjoy my shade, but given the way he keeps up his house and his fence I fear he'd soon be camped out on my lawn with a lot of friends and family. His whole operation is one step away from old appliances and rusted cars as lawn decorations. Then again I don't like cutting my lawn or weeding my garden, so maybe if I let him hang out under the tree he'll do the job that I won't do.

The tree began to shed leaves in early June. Just a few fell at first. A couple here and a some more there. I enjoyed their chance patterns on the grass and the flower beds. They were small and tan and had an almost Zen effect when seen among the blossoms; little bits of punctuation, small notes of color. The tree had so many leaves that the few that fell didn't diminish it. I didn't notice any thinning and I certainly didn't think the tree was ill. After all, it was a large tree and it had sheltered the house for a long time. The trunk was thick and strong. It's roots ran deep into the soil. It had been there longer than the house.

I went away for some weeks in June and into July and when I returned my lawn looked as if it was not high summer but late autumn. The grass was covered with small tan leaves, and even though the tree above was still thick with dark green leaves it was obvious that something was amiss. It was even more obvious when you walked on the lawn and came away with clots of leaves stuck to the bottom of your shoes.

I took my ladder from the garage and set it against the trunk. I climbed up to where the branches dangled down and looked closely at the leaves. They were dark green as always but had an unhealthy sheen to them as if they had become overheated and begun to sweat. Touching them left a sticky, unpleasant residue on my hands.

I looked more closely at the trunk and saw a host of small black bugs on the surface of the white bark and even more against the black patches. There didn't seem to be any of those bugs on the leaves that I could reach, but all those leaves were coated with the same tacky sheen. It had the consistency of the adhesive side of Scotch tape.

I'm no arborist. I didn't know what was making my tree sick but it was not thriving. Fortunately Seattle is a city where more inhabitants worship trees than worship God. I put a few twigs and leaves in one Ziploc bag and some of the black bugs in another and drove off to a nearby plant cathedral to ask one of their many priests.

He looked at the bags, ran his fingers over the outside, and didn't even bother to open them. "Aphids. Lots and lots of aphids. And since aphids are born pregnant you're going to have a lot more."

I looked closely at the bags. Very closely. I'd noticed a plant in the back yard that had been stricken with aphids in early June. Those had been thick colonies of lice sized insects. I carpet-bombed them with insecticide from an altitude of eight feet. They never knew what hit them. But I couldn't see any aphids inside the bag, just sticky leaves. "There's no bugs in there," I remarked to the priest of plants.

"Nope. The bugs are higher up in the tree. This is honeydew coating the leaves. A lot of honeydew. And that means a lot of bugs."

My far-too-literary mind immediately delivered the closing lines of Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn,"
"For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."

I'd always thought those lines very evocative and alluring. "Honeydew?" I asked.

"It's what the bugs excrete after they suck out the sap from the tree," he said.

Score one more metaphor forever ruined.

"What do I do to stop it?"

"You have to get it sprayed or injected. Probably both. Spray and inject is probably best. That's what we do here. I'll give you the number of an eco-friendly tree care company. No toxins... biodegradable sprays... all that jazz."

"Is that the best way?" I asked and gave him a straight look.

He glanced about him to check that we were alone at the tree altar in the plant cathedral. "Not really," he said in a confidential tone, "but that's all the company allows me to recommend. Otherwise we'd have a picket line of eco-nuts in front of the parking lot in a twinkling and that would be very bad for business. You want anything stronger, stuff that will really get the job done, get out your phone book and... call around."

I felt like we were two guys whispering on a street corner about where to score "the hard stuff." I thanked him for the information, took the eco-friendly number, and left.

Back home I stood in the yard and gazed up at my sheltering tree. Then I raked the yard and hosed off the walkway. It took a long time since all the leaves were coated with the crap of "aphid honeydew" and stuck to the grass and the pavement. Nature's Super-Glue.

As I was finishing my neighbor from the south came out and strolled through the hole in his fence and across the lawn to where I was working. It was a hot day and he held an iced Corona. (He favors that brand but never offers me one, just kind of toasts me from his porch. If he wasn't obviously Norwegian I'd expect him to say, "Hola mano. Que tal?")

"What's up with your tree?" he asked. "Those leaves are falling all over my yard and they're a mess."

I told him the tree was sick. "There's an infestation of aphids high up in the crown sucking the sap out of the tree and dripping their crap all over anything below."

"Heh, sounds like a Bush/Cheny disease and that's always bad," he offered, leaning against his part of the fence that still stood while watching me rake and clean. (Nearly everybody in Seattle's Queen Anne is a Democrat and assumes you are as well -- it's an "innocent until stated guilty" place.)

"It is bad. I'll have to get an arborist in to spray it and inject it."

"Whoa. Be sure and tell me when that happens so I can close my windows. And be sure to use those companies that don't use toxins. They'll cost you more but you don't want to risk real poisons."

As usual my neighbor was more than happy to suggest any solution at all to my infestation problem that involved extra hassle and me reaching for my wallet.

"I'll let you know," I said. "I'll let you know."

I've made the calls and I've tried to be a good citizen. I got the arborist from "In Harmony" tree service to come by. She said it will take 8 injections and cost about $300. She gave me a brochure printed in bio-degradable inks on recycled paper too. It explains the benefits to the entire planet of their methods in somewhat fuzzy type. It doesn't explain why it costs $300 to give a tree eight shots. Like other things in this city, this country, and this era, "the solution" to "the problem" is not exactly crisp and effective, but it sounds nice and feels good.

Still, there's no question that the stately tree that shelters me is sick, sticky and a mess. I've got to stop the insects infesting the top from crapping all over everything below. Organic's too slow and too expensive by half. I think I'm going to have to start hanging out in the shadier places of the Seattle tree scene, trying to make a connection with people who can really "Git-R-Done!"

Posted by Vanderleun at April 30, 2017 9:49 AM
Bookmark and Share

Comments:

HOME

"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.

Have you considered using ladybugs?

http://www.thebeneficialinsectco.com/aphid-control-ladybugs.htm

Posted by: lordsomber at July 18, 2007 12:19 PM

From AlBore bloviating about carbon footprints from the hatchway of his private jets, through John Edwards' pandering to the poverty pimps from under his $400 haircuts, down to the eco-insane neighbors so obsessed with herbal this and organic something else that they can't find time to wash their windows, the liberal world is fixated with improving everyone but themselves.

No price is too high or inconvenience too great - for someone else.

My son-in-law, the botanist, points out that Ladybugs are already near the end of their life-span when you buy them. And that if they were really interested in eating all the aphids on any particular plant or tree in any specific place at any certain time, they would already be there.

Welcome back to Seattle, Gerard.

Posted by: AskMom at July 19, 2007 5:24 AM

Nuke 'em. For what it's worth, I'd do the neighbor as well. Coronas indeed!

Posted by: Gnawbone Jack at July 19, 2007 7:17 AM

One of the first things you can do, right now, is to get a spray nozzle on your hose and blast the undersides of all of the branches and leaves. Seriously, aphids that get washed off have a hard time getting back on. (The is the recommended basic aphid treatment from the gardener whose radio show I run.)

Also, once you've done the aphid treatment, get some Tanglefoot (sticky stuff) to paint around the trunk since a large aphid infestation is often prompted by ants, who farm the suckers. Stop the ants from climbing the tree and there's less chance of a major reoccurrence.

Posted by: B. Durbin at July 19, 2007 7:25 PM

My first cure for everything that ails is hydrogen peroxide...other than that, I sure hope you can get this tree healthy again....what a worthy project....

Years ago, a friend and I were hiking in the woods when we saw a live little dogwood tree seriously bent under the weight of a huge fallen limb. I couldn't stand it and so we worked, tugged, lifted and pulled until we had freed the little sapling. Finally it sprung back to vertical position, but tilted mightily.

Years later, we when pass that spot on the trail, I am happy to report that it stands tall if not almost straight. It may still have the memory of being momentarily subdued but seems to grow straighter every year towards the sun.

Posted by: Webutante at July 20, 2007 7:36 AM

Maybe you can get a carbon credit for saving your tree. Call the Goracle.

Posted by: expat at July 21, 2007 5:50 AM

So, Gerard, is the tree still standing?

Posted by: Roll-aid at April 23, 2015 10:37 AM

I'm hoping the tree still stands?

Posted by: M*A at April 23, 2015 12:52 PM

The article is 8 years old, but I'm sure they're still blaming all of the worlds ills on Bush/Cheney today.

Posted by: Dr. Ted Nelson at April 23, 2015 2:20 PM

There is an insecticide (horrors) that can be watered in to the roots. Works very well with my pecans. We haven't had a aphid outbreak in several years so i can't recall its name

Posted by: mhf at April 23, 2015 2:46 PM

Yes.... the tree is now fine. Nothing like a little serious pest elimination to eliminate the pests.

Posted by: vanderleun at April 23, 2015 6:05 PM

So....... Did you get the hardcore "real stuff" to save it????

Posted by: Hangtown Bob at April 26, 2015 9:12 AM

Why of course I did. Mail order over the internet is a wonderful thing.

Posted by: vanderleun at April 30, 2017 11:07 AM