Horseman, your question about the growth rate is similar to what I am wondering. My tree has not added any height at all since it was planted last year. Neither does the trunk seemed to have thicken enough for me to perceive, if at all. If the late winter freeze issues had not distracted me, I would have been posting questions about the slow growth rate. Yesterday, I read on a website describing the cultivar, that the 'Gold Rush' cultivar does grow slower than the species. My 'Gold Rush' has a clean trunk about 3 feet up before the trunk forks of into two thin, flexible and arching, but still slightly branched and well leafed out trunks which makes up the canopy of the tree. It looks to me that the only reason the trunk is not branching out lower on the trunk is due to the way the grower pruned and trained the tree prior to shipping it to me. I planted mine in mid May of last year, and yes in the heat and drought of the summer the leaves did tend to want to turn brown. Whenever I saw the slightest amount of browning in the leaves, I would water the tree well, and each time, the leaves responded quickly, by changing again to their nice bright healthy color. Currently the leaves of my 'Gold Rush' look golden, and I can see some of the healthy bright green of the cultivar's normal spring leaf color trying to emerge from the base of those golden colored leaves.

And Growing like the weeds they are? Wow. I hope my Gold Rush does not leave me with that opion of it after it has established and grown 4 years for me. I went out in the rain this afternoon to get a 15 gallon potted weeping yaupon holly and planted it at my daughter's house. While at the nursery, I also found a banana tree ( a Chinese cultivar) which is reported as hardy enough to survive our winters. Well after planting the Yaupon and returning home, I planted the banana tree directly in the high clay content soil next to a privacy fence underwhich lots of rain runoff from our neighbor's yard enters ours. The Gold Rush is planted in a slight mound very close to that area. So the cleanup area for my tools was very close the Gold Rush. That is when I noticed, finally the buds have changed and now there are actually baby leaves emerging from most of them. Happy, happy, joy, joy! Yesterday, I applied some Osmocote, and was hoping that I did not give it the wrong thing. I know the general advice is that trees do not need to be fertilized, but since the tree seemed to be struggling so long to make leaves for making food for its roots, and since there has been so many cloudy days these last two weeks, I figured the tree needed some help. I still do not know if the tree is being benefited by the Osmocote though, or if it would have change for the better today even if I had not given it the slow release 19-6-12 fertilizer, which only allows about 5% of the nitrogen dosage as it slowly releases.

I just checked the info on the Greenwood nursery site from where I purchased the tree. They claim it was grown in a 3 gallon size pot to its 4-5 foot size, and they had reduced the soil around the rootball to make it less heavy for shipping. They also say it grows well in any wet soil, even to the point of them suggesting for customers to plant it by a stream. If the information they provide is correct then the spring rains should not be causing my tree any problems. Streams can often overflow much deeper than the amount of standing water I have seen, after our heavy rain fall events, around the planting area where my tree is planted. So what could be causing my currently 5' 5" tall single trunked tree to be so sluggish in its attempt to fully recover?

Thanks for the suggestions, I did very little damage to the roots. Rinsed away all the potting soil, and gently untangled any roots I saw that needed straightening out. when I was finished, the majority of fine feeder roots were undamaged and still firmly attached to the thicker main roots which I had untangled. Even after cutting some of the thicker roots at the point of the 45 degree bend in them, there remained, still, plenty of fine feeder roots growing out of that thick root above the cut I made. No, the tree (when originally removed and repotted) was not rootbound. Just prior to this original post, I had at that time shaken off all the new potting soil, which many new roots had grown into, since I first repotted the 3 gallon potted tree into a larger 10 or 15 gallon decorator pot. Then after considering the early responses to this post, I dug the tree up again and rinsed the original 3 gallon amount of potting soil away, also. At that time as mentioned in my above response, some of those roots could be seen circling the trunk just below the first major sized roots growing out of the trunk, but I simply unwound most of them and broke only a few. So earlier, when I said that I bare rooted my tree, I did not mean that I had remove all the fine feeder roots like seen when suppliers ship bare root trees in the spring. True this activity did likely hit the tree and is going to set the tree back, But I could not do such root disturbance before the tree went dormant. As it is, the tree only dropped its leaves last week, due to our extended warmer than normal fall temps that lasted until the 8th of this month when cold rain began and temps flirted around the freezing mark just enough to create major ice damage on the area trees and powerlines. I am sure, now this tree is even more confused, since today our high temps rose to 61 degrees, and another cold front is not forecast to blow through and drop us back to winter temps, until this weekend. Today, no telling how the tree is responding to its roots, yesterday, being totally exposed, rinsed, untangled, spread out and recovered with dirt. Yesterday, I did position the root flare at soil level and filled around the roots with virgin soil. Then I mixed some soil with oak leaves and covered the planting area as a type of mulch. I still plan on covering the planting area even deeper with a shredded cedar mulch just prior to the next cold front; scheduled to arrive in a few days. I probably should install around the tree some "T" stakes and tie them, just loose enough so the tree can still move with the wind; just not enough for its roots to be pulled out of the ground so its fine feeder roots won't end up ripped away. Right now the tree is standing straight and tall, and I am tempted to think that since it has no leaves to catch the wind, it might not need to be staked, but in reality I do not want to be proven wrong once the windy cold front blows through and just in case it causes enough damage for me otherwise to have to be out in the cold, wet winds, staking the tree anyway. I had enough of such emergency staking to do, during last weeks cold weather event, for lots of my just about to become well established trees, which all summer and fall had seemed to not need staking.