The only things that have started to leaf out here are a Meteor and an Evans cherry that I planted last week. The lilacs buds are swelling, so it won't be long for them, but most of the deciduous trees at my place won't leaf out until late April, early May. The Kentucky Coffee is always the last to leaf out. I'm about 30 minutes north of Denver. Barb

Many times when a tree or shrub gets black it is becoz of a scale infestation. Can also be aphids I beleive. The scale or the aphids excrete a liquid called honeydew. It is sticky and sooty mold then grows on it. If you google scale or aphids + honeydew + sooty mold you will certainly get lots of hits to explain the connection and see if that seems to be the problem. Look closely at the tree and the shrubs for the infestation, look on the bark and on the undersides of the leaves. I've seen this on crape myrtles and on various types of magnolias. Even better would be to take some of the black parts to a master gardener or county agent. You can google your parish and master gardeners or county agent, also called extension service. This can be treated in various ways. You should use the least toxic method. You can also hand remove scale and/or prune some of the infected branches, and you can physically remove ahphids with a strong hose spray and some use a soapy water spray. Good luck.

Cara, this is our 19th spring here. There are mature black walnut trees in our yard and we have removed several. When we came here tall garden phlox, iris, daffodils, and star of Bethelehem were already well established and still going strong. We recently had some of the black walnut trees trimmed and are expanding a garden area around them including spiderwort, daylilies, dame's rocket and stoksia. Where we removed 2 black walnuts that had been growing close together we have established a bed of several kinds of iris, varigated periwinkle, a sweet brier rose, tiger lilies and a crape myrtle. We have found a hickory horned devil caterpillar and others. We also have the beautiful luna moths. I have some old photos of them I could load if anyone would like to see the pictures. EP

jjpeace (zone 5 US/zone 6 Can), thank you for the additional information. Particularly: " BS is a problem for me in late summer, mainly late august" I sometimes/often had put into my posts in threads like this that I got blackspot at the end of the season in what was then a 1000 no spray rose bed, but I was not concerned as I suspect that it is part of Nature's way of helping my roses prepare for winter. If you feel that your blackspot is appearing too early (are some of the rose leaves turning red, are other plants/trees starting to lose their leaves?) then I suggest that you try to determine what could be weakening your plants immune system at that time. Such as: are they not getting enough water or sunlight? There are external ways to help boost a roses immune system. The use of commercial harpin type products or salicylic acid type products (such as aspirin) come to mind. This link leads to a general background article which may be useful concerning boosting a plant's immune system: http://horttech.ashspublications.org/content/15/3/518.full.pdf Your PDF find command can locate specific places where the word rose appears.