first.. do we need to confirm the ID??

we had a silver maple in the back yard at moms.. for near 60 years ... i dont ever recall any suckers .... so i think thats the base issue here ...

but as far as painting suckers... paint one.. all can possibly die ... IMO ...

ken

maybe he meant white poplar - Populus alba. They do sucker like crazy.

Whatever they are, treating the stumps of a 30' sucker with glyphosate (or any systemic herbicide) is going to affect the parent plant if they are still connected!

This is tricky. You do realize of course...you are going to continue to deal with suckers? The long term solution is to just replace the poplar with a better tree for house-shading.

As for the leftover stumps, the right concentration of the right herbicide could certainly manage to just kill the left over stumps and minimally impact the mother tree. But there are far too many variables to recommend an approach. The wrong concentration of the wrong herbicide could certainly seriously damage the "mother tree". You haven't even told us how far away they are. If it were me I might try to spray the foliar _regrowth_ of the stumps, with a standard strong glyphosate _spray_ mix, say 5%. Which would ordinarily kill similarly sized seedlings. Unless the suckers are very close I don't think it will affect the main tree, but I can't guarantee it. Especially because I have no experience dealing with poplar as a weed and don't know about the specific level of sensitivity it has. It could be especially sensitive to glyphosate, or not. (Legumes, for example, are incredibly sensitive to triclopyr, and I once almost killed a Kentucky coffee tree seedling just by spraying some Oxalis about 1' away from it with a typical spray formulation...nothing too concentrated. There was definitely no direct contact, it either happened due to vaporization or triclopyr residue in the soil.)

It may be overkill but you could try sucker stopper. White poplar is a colonial species (like sumac).

I dunno, I wouldn't quite say the chances are zero...but in any case it's a fool's errand because you're just going to get other suckers. In a lawn you could pay to have them ground up with a stump grinder - I guess they make small ones(?), and then be sure to keep it frequently mown. I've been mowing the suckers from my Clerodendron for 3 years now and the stupid things just don't stop. It's 30 feet away from a bed and I'm beginning to worry that wasn't far enough.

Yes, white poplar or Populus alba is a clonal or colonial-means the same thing in this context-tree, each individual ramet of which constitutes what most people think of as an individual tree. Usually you'll see clumps or groves of single-species stands and these are likely to be such a colony. I guilty pleasure of mine-I know the tree is tier-two invasive (or maybe Tier Three) yet I quite enjoy the scene of the very silvery foliage slapping in the breeze.

Yes, P. alba, not silver maple (I have enough of those ^%$@ trees in my yard as well, thanks to the previous owners). Sorry about the confusion.

And yes, eventually I would like to take out the largest tree as well and replace it with something else, but I'm already looking at a couple thousand in arborist bills with the current plan, which basically wipes out my landscaping budget for the next couple of years.