Kelper: Young persimmon trees appreciate deep, rich soil, preferably with a heavy mulch, and resent competition from weeds and grass around the trunks. Your tree is practically being choked out by roots from the grasses growing right up to the little trunk. All your tree needs is a little care, starting with some hand weeding to remove the grasses in a circle at least 4 feet in diameter, followed by some balanced fertilizer and several inches of mulch. I planted three bareroot Asian persimmons in spring, '07, and they put on 4 feet of growth the first season, and I am now having to prune them back to keep them from getting out of hand. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Two ways. If you have to picture sized down to 60K, post it in the Trees Gallery. If you don't want to or can't resize your picture, open up a free account on somewhere like photobucket.com. After you upload your picture there, there will be an HTML link provided. Click that and it will be copied for you. Come back to this message and paste the link. When you go to "preview message", you should be able to see the picture if you did it right. Please make sure you have a picture of a leaf that is close enough to identify. And indicate where the tree is located (e.g., Detroit, Michigan). Here is a link that might be useful: Tree Gallery

bad news ... anything without a leaf is dead ... presuming that pic is current ... which doesnt leave much ... and that trunk crotch is a nightmare ... get rid of it... it is a very short lived tree .. in tree years ... its overly mature... and just not worth the effort ,... IMHO ... in my world.. its an opportunity.. for something new ... even if you insist on the same ... it was a bad winter for such... and i would presume... that is what did it in.. or put it over the top ... i would prefer.. if you come back often.. that you learn to put the pix right int he post.. look for the HTML code... and paste it where you type ... and on preview.. if you see it.. we will ... sorry.. its just not worth the battle to resurrect it.. right there out the picture window.. in the front yard ... ken

allina, let me come at this a little differently. By your description I think the bobcat's issues may have been a weight lifting issue. Smaller bobcats only have a lifting capacity of around 500-1000 pounds. If they were trying to get deep under the tree and he put his forks down in the soil very far, it would make sense that he could not lift it. Between the resistance from the roots and the compacted soil, I could see it exceeding the bobcats's lifting ability pretty quickly. But I've also dug out 12' spruces before by hand so it is doable. Spruce tree root structures aren't all the extensive when they're young. The picture may be misleading me but it appears the tree is only about 5-6' tall. You also said the tree has been in the ground for some time so let's say it's a dwarf that is pretty well settled in. You should still be able to dig out a root ball around the base of that tree say 1 to 1 1/2' out from the trunk in all directions and then down about 2', and you'll have all the roots you'd need for that tree to survive. Adding to that depth another foot just to compenate for the deep planting originally, that means you'd be digging a ball 2-3' round and 3' deep. That's should be manageable for a couple of strong people. Lifting the weight of the rootball once you have it ready to go will be the difficult task. Then you can either move it to a new location or simply fill in about a foot or so of dirt under the root ball you lifted and then place it back in the hole. Once done now scrape off the top foot or so of dirt surrounding the trunk with your shovel. There shouldn't be any roots in the dirt to speak of since all the dirt was above the original root ball. When you start hitting a lot of tiny fibrous roots then stop scraping and that will be your new ground level base. Be sure the base is a little above your yard's normal ground level for good drainage. Now recover with mulch up to about 2-3" away from the trunk. mark