LOOK , the damn thing has NO root ball

hope your new plant has more root mass

what did the nursery say about this mess ?

ron

I thought maybe the rootball rotted out. The nursery said I may have overwatered. I never did show them a picture of the rootball as I dug it up after I picked up the new tree.

Here is a picture of the new root ball:

My experience with conifers that start drying out from the bottom up is overwatering. Which seems to be the case in your first picture. When they start drying out from the top down it's too much sun exposure OR under watering.

"The nursery said I may have overwatered."

Did they see pics of that rootball? It died because when it was dug it had no roots to support it. Dead green standing is a term we use for the time between when a plant dies and it actually shows up as brown needles. It can take some time for death to appear as what little root mass there was struggles to keep itself alive.

tj

P.S. Its Serbian Spruce, not Siberian.

The nursery should be embarrassed for selling a tree like that. Doesn't anybody there check the rootballs?!! Crap like that can ruin a business.

Show them the picture. They should send that picture to their supplier in the hope of them getting better quality control. That Serbian spruce should have been thrown away as soon as it was dug. It had no chance of surviving. Zero. Nick, nothing you did caused it's death.

Mike

Though a handful of us would like to see some Siberian spruce!

+oM

Wow, someone took an axe to those primary roots. I bought a six foot taxus fastigiate once and it was just the same in a sand mix. It died from the get go. I think some nurseries think roots can be pruned like top growth.

i would take the root ball back to the nursery ... and ask again.. if watering was the issue ... perhaps they can return it to the wholesale grower ...

it was a field digging issue .... the base problem being.... they cant see the result of the dig ...

if it were a one foot tree.... with that mess .. perhaps it could have made it ... but not at the size it was ...

i give your seller props for replacing it ....

it died.. because 99% of its root mass was cut off at digging ...

ken

Agree with the others - 99.5% of the root system was cut off; you can see the thick cut roots which denied it any hope of survival.

Resin

That is crazy. You should show them that picture! The most perfect watering in the world isn't going to fix the fact that someone hacked off half the root system. That's insane

Actually I planted a much larger Serbian spruce once that turned out to have a similarly truncated root inside a "false ball" (fine-textured field soil formed into a round ball to give the impression of a larger, branching root system) and it grew like a weed, with no special care afterward - I remember in particular that the top did not even appear markedly stunted the first growing season after planting. So the severe cutting of the root is apparently not, in fact guaranteed to have been the source of difficulty in this instance. And I bet if wholesale growers were surveyed it would come out that they had found that it was often possible to cut roots of this and similar items way back and get away with it. In fact they may even be doing it to promote branching, the idea being that they are causing small, dense, easily dug root systems to result. I know one grower here I have heard talk about it was definitely doing this to overcome the otherwise supposedly sparse and unsuitable root systems of field-grown cypresses.

Key word..."growers here".......Yes, we can get away with a lot here in the NW with our cool, damp, Zone 8 winters. Quite a bit harder in other areas of the country though.

Still, a poorly delivered tree all the way down the chain, beginning with the digger. Maybe beginning with the guy that made the decision that that row was OK to dig, especially after the first few trees. I doubt the tree you bought was an aberration, other than maybe it slipped through the system.

It took me a while, but I got into the habit of checking the rootballs before purchasing.

Mike

The "oh, well it's different here" thing is an obvious idea to jump to but I am not sure it has any particular application to this specific situation, or what I was talking about in regard to the spruce I planted. My tree behaved as though being planted with only stumps for roots was no problem at all. And I probably planted it in the spring, without any mulch.

We're talking about a ~5 ft. specimen with a root system pretty much the size and shape of my opened, down-pointing hand, after I took away the nearly empty ball of field soil.

Elsewhere during one organized trial of deciduous trees a wide range in tolerance to air exposure was discovered, with each representative used for each genus falling in a distinctly different point on the scale from the others. For instance at one end American sweet-gum had pretty much no ability to withstand being bare-rooted and exposed to air, American ash fell somewhere in the middle and at the other end Little-leaf linden could apparently be left out of the ground for months - and then grow away normally after being re-planted.

So there probably isn't an across-the-board uniformity in how various conifers are affected by supposed insults to the roots either. Certainly those kinds that are bonsai favorites must not be spoiled by having their roots kept trimmed and very limited in size.

This is becoming really interesting. It's always fun to follow a thread where passionate plants people exchange ideas and opinions.