Hi palms I don't have any good maple seeds at this time of year, send me an email (go to my page and click "send me an email") and we can arrange a trade for later if you want. Here is a link that might be useful: my page

Any questions anyone has about Sudden Oak Death, you can direct to me. That's what I do for 40 hours a week, is look for it. SOD has not been found in the wild in Washington. It has never yet been seen on bigleaf maple in WA, or on any of our native plants, whether in the wild, in landscapes, or in nurseries. The probability of your having it on your mature trees in your yard is essentially zero. Newly planted rhodies that the nursery brought in from CA or OR is a different story, but even there the chances are very slim. There is a saying in medical diagnostics which applies here. When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras. SOD would be even rarer than a zebra here. More like an okapi or something. I've heard of arborists telling their clients that their trees are dying of SOD but that's just plain irresponsible. Might as well say your tree has west nile virus. SOD cannot be diagnosed in the field. I've been doing this for over a year and I can't say when I've found it. Only the plant pathology lab can make a definitive diagnosis, and the lab has to be licensed by the USDA to do the work. I think you can take leaf or twig samples in a sealed plastic baggie to the Master Gardeners and they'll send it on to WSU but I'm not sure about that. In any case, SOD kills tanoaks and live oaks but that's about it. It has not been found on garry oaks. It can sicken and slowly kill rhodies. Most all other hosts simply get an icky leaf or twig blight that does not kill the plant. That includes bigleaf maples and doug firs. Frankly, for our native plants, it's just another leaf blight, and a very minor one at that. I see no cause for panic. For more info on SOD than you can shake a stick at, see the link below. Bear in mind that their focus is California, where the tanoaks and live oaks are dying. The host list is quite long, but many of those plants have only been found positive for SOD once - in a CA forest surrounded by dying oaks, for instance, or in a European nursery. For instance, the only time doug fir has come up positive is in CA xmas tree farms surrounded by dying oaks. Here, it's basically a very rare disease of nursery rhodies, kalmias, and camellias. It would be like someone here getting malaria - not exactly a likely occurrence! Every tree has a limited life span. 200 year old bigleaf maples are approaching the upper limit of their life span. All trees die and fall eventually. The symptoms described by Sarabera sound like verticillium wilt to me, for which there is no cure. You can prune out killed branches and see if the rest of the tree can shake it off. Verticillium likes soil that alternates between very wet and very dry, just like we get here! Building and paving definitely affect water movement in and under the soil, and affect how much water tree roots get and when - usually by speeding up the flow so more water goes by in winter and less in summer. Disturbed soil holds less water than undisturbed soil too so trees dry out faster. We got plenty of rain this winter and the soil was definitely filled with as much water as it can hold, and the underground aquifers too. Probably not strictly drought stress but just a combination of extreme age, stress from urbanization, and verticillium taking advantage of wet/dry cycles. And, it's normal for them to start going into fall color and leaf drop in late summer when stressed. You want an ISA certified arborist. Here is a link that might be useful: California Oak Mortality Task Force

Yep, I do know about willows and water lines, but thanks for the reminder. and I totally agree that sycamores are messy beasts. I would never want one in my yard for that very reason, but I do like to admire the big ones that other people have . . . as long as I don't need to clean up after them. I imagine that all of you are aware of the cottonwood's history as far as the pioneers and the hardy folks of the old west were concerned? If they could see a cottonwood in the distance, they knew that they'd find water nearby. I just like to hear the rattle of the leaves and see the flash of silver in the wind. I grew up with one of them, a big old thing that we used to climb, and my sister and I thought it was so neat to take bags and fill them up with the 'cotton'. We thought we'd make pillows from it. Isn't it funny the place that trees have in our lives? I imagine all of us could name a favorite tree that we remember from childhood. We also had a big chinaberry tree, which was not in the least invasive where it was, but it would be in OK. Of course, I also grew up with a view of miles and miles of orange groves when I looked out the bedroom window. It breaks my heart to think they are all gone now, ripped out to make way for more and more subdivisions. I didn't know that the big sumac likes to be a clump, but that's fine with me. We have a blank 3-acre field to put it in, and it could use a showpiece like that. I did know that the smaller ones like to clump. Does anyone know what the growth rate is on them? I'll definitely look up the lacebark elm. I like elms, but am always watching for susceptibility to disease. Coming from the NorCal as I did, I've seen some of the most magnificent old oaks, but the CA Live Oak in particular. I have photos of giant boulders with these old trees growing up through cracks in the rock. I do have a sad story to tell about them, though, and it's a good example of what happens when people go fooling around with a natural habitat. Those big oaks do not like to be watered. They've lived for 100 years or more, perfectly happy with what the natural climate gives them. Then people come along and begin tweaking it around, as happened on the campus of the Santa Rosa Jr College. The trees there would take your breath away. They were so carefully pruned and tended by the best in the business. But . . . they overlooked the fact that a lot of topsoil had been brought in years before and then a lovely lawn planted on it and watered to keep it green. It took years for the trees to begin to die, but die they did. One huge one keeled over in the middle of a picnic on the lawn and made headline news. The professionals were called in to find the problem and see it if could be corrected. They had to dig out trenches about 24" deep and several feet wide to clear out the topsoil that had been jammed around the base of each tree, and put in grates to allow the trunks to breathe as they should. The old trees were very forgiving of the abuse that they'd gotten with all that water, but finally it was just too much for them. I don't know how many of them were lost before the corrections were made or if it solved the problem in the long run. I haven't been back past the college in years. It's just a word to the wise. Sometimes it's not good to mess with Mother Nature. Pat

I am kinda bored here, so I will just add that i wish I had more leaves than I do. I will have plenty in a few years. I like to make compost. I used to go collect folks fall leaves at the leaf dump. This is the first year for a while which I haven't done it actually. In my last post I meant to say to mow them over in spring, but I said fall. But if you mow them over in spring or fall and add kitchen peelings of fruits/veggies and mix with a garden fork or use a tumbler, you can add to your garden to improve your soil. Sorry if you already do this, or know about it but don't wanna do it. Just figured I'd add that idea. It helps create the "humusy soil" that some plants seen to favor, For some adding peat moss sparingly helps also. I know this is the tree forum, but some shade plants for under these trees appreciate leaf mold and composted organic material etc. Poaky1