I had one and lost it to what I think was verticillium. It has a lovely shape - redbuds naturally are vase-shaped but this one was very gracefully so. The leaves were smaller than the species and slightly puckered. I had it next to a patio and it was great. I was sorry to lose it.

i wouldnt put it too close to the house.. dont know if i believe that size estimate ... or what time period it is for ...

one thing for sure.. it isnt going to stop at those mystical numbers .... double spacing to give it twice the space ...

ken

Sara, If i get it i hope it doesn't succumb to that wilt.

Ken, I was thinking the samething about the size. I hope it doesnt get any bigger that what is advertised. I was gonna place it about 7ft from the corner of my home.

no tree ...EVER ... stops growing at a given size ....

its just a matter of its annual growth rate ... multiplied by the years ...

google listed regular growth rate at moderate ... as is this one listed ...

yet monrovia throws little in the name.. so one might suspect its has a growth rate reduced from the norm ...

one problem with the newest and brightest offerings ... no one has had one for a decade ... well.. maybe monrovia has one ...

from the link ... 4 to 5 feet off trunk ... doesnt leave you much extra space at 7 feet out ....

what do you mean 'from the corner' .... straight out from the house.. or angled ...

whatever you decide. you can make it fit thru proper pruning .... if you are up to it in 15 or 20 years ....

ken

I was thinking 7 ft angled.... But i might just stick it somewhere in the backyard.

I dont even know if i will be in the same house in 15 to 20 years. lol

I bet the jack pear will be a beautiful specimen by then.

It is a very slow-grower and you can prune it easily. Mine was in a corner where the house and patio come together and the vase shape was particularly attractive there. I had this at least 10-12 years ago - it's new but not brand new. The cultivar that it is closest to in habit is 'Ace of Hearts', which is another nice dwarf cultivar.

'Little Woody' was first patented in 2003, so it's been around for a while. According to the patent information, an "average" mature tree will be 10' by 8', which is an extremely manageable size for just about any garden.

btw, although being grown and sold by Monrovia, this is not a Monrovia plant. As are most of the stock this massive wholesaler offers for sale.

I just dont understand why Monrovia's prices are so high on their website.

I ordered the jack pear last spring and before my local nursery placed their next order with Monrovia, it was already sold out. Even though i paid for the plant! They did not hold one for me. My garden center told me when i called then it would be about 3 months before they placed another order. then when i called them again they told be it would be in the fall! So i cant really rely on my nursery to get it in at anytime i feel like asking. I hope to God that they place and order at spring time so that i actually receive my plants this year! Monrovia wont ship a plant someone orders unless they nursery that is receiving it is gonna be buying a full truck worth of stuff.

Yes, I wouldn't expect that Monrovia would hold a plant because a retail garden center somewhere had taken money for it from a third party. But I haven't studied how this new Monrovia "retailing" is supposed to be set up - I've just assumed that they were doing their own separate direct-to-customer on-line retail sales to make up for a recent falling off of their wholesale volumes.

The past routine I'm acquainted with is independent garden centers bringing in requested plants as circumstances permit, then charging the customers asking for them when they come in and get them. The same as if they had already been ordered for general presentation anyway, in stock before that customer came into the store and saw them, decided to make a purchase. For instance last year I asked an outlet here for a particular rose that was new on the market, was probably going to be in short supply. When they had received this variety (and potted them) I was telephoned to come and get mine. It was off to the side inside a compound, marked with my contact information. At that point I paid at the register and walked out with it.

I suspect in this instance that they got the same small number of these that they were going to get at that time anyway, and that what those of us "ordering" it were in effect saying "dibs" before the stock was delivered. Types such as these that are shipped once per year, bare-rooted (or any others that are only available on a seasonal or otherwise strictly limited basis, for whatever specific reasons in each instance) aren't really going to lend themselves to true special ordering, where the system comes up with a finished plant any and every time a consumer might happen to ask.

The garden center did not take my money. I paid directly through the monrovia website. The cost was $90 dollars if i recall. They (Monrovia) sent an email telling my they had refunded my money because they sold out. The strange thing is when i ordered it for the second time back in November, the price was only $74. Which is still high for a small potted tree......But i cant find the dang thing anywhere else.

I though that they would ship it to the garden center as soon as i ordered it. But the Monrovia site does not tell you that you have to wait for the garden center to place its own order before they will send out yours with it..

Gimme a few hours and I can snap a pic of a regular redbud about 7 foot off a house. The tree was mature looking when I moved in over a decade ago. It might be in decline now. Story goes after planting a young Airdale(spelling?) kept chewing it to the ground and it grew back with cool twisted trunks.

Regardless, this shorter but thicker than average redbud with minimal pruning it is fine 7 feet off a house.

you have to wait for the garden center to place its own order before they will send out yours with it

That's called "piggybacking". When Monrovia (or whoever) is dropping an order at a retailer or other customer near you anyway your one item comes off with it - unaffiliated commercial customers needing small orders arrange to do the same thing also. For instance when an arborist I worked for needed a Japanese cherry for a customer they arranged with the grower and a retailer the grower was sending stock to to have this tree included in the load, dropped along with the retailer's purchases.

So it sounds like really this buying retail directly from Monrovia is the same is if you ordered through the garden center in the first place. Only worse because you have put money up front but don't seem to have reserved a table, so to speak, anymore than if you had made a random request to a garden center purchasing department, were waiting to see what they might be able to do for you.

And it also sounds like a body might be paying more than when placing a special order with a garden center!

The price difference between $74 one time and $90 the next would presumably be due to something like a growth having been flushed between or it being a new year, with a new, across the board pricing schedule reflecting increases in operating costs including fuel prices (a big deal with nursery goods).

I might be better off asking Lowe's to special order it......

I avoid Monrovia like the plague. They overgrow their plants in those narrow tall pots that actually deform the roots more than standard pots.

You can get a 3 gallon from here. Their quality is average to above average.

http://www.rarefindnursery.com/index.php/trees-shrubs/cercis-redbud/cercis-canadensis-little-woody.html

whaas_5a Thanks!

I did not even think to search anywhere else for the tree. I know its kinda rare.....

Its also half the price of what Monrovia is asking.

We have a couple of dwarf redbuds. only been in the ground a couple years, so hard to give a full response.

Of interest, locally, redbuds are nearly non existent in the area. Old timers refer to them as dead-buds, so there's something in this region, be it altitude, spring weather, winter wind, summer humidity...whatever.

The spring of 2016 locally was brutal. Early warm weather followed by long lingering cool, damp, seasonally cold weather. local orchards were hard hit, certain crops locally were wiped put entirely (cherries, apricots, peaches, plums. only pears and apples had any harvest and they were down signigicantly).

We have 5 redbud trres. Two recently planted dwarves, still under 3' tall, and two with trunks close to 6", ten to 12' overall size, and one weeping at about 5' tall. the larger trees and the weeper had very few flowers and took forever to leaf out...if you were impatient, you may well have yanked them. ultimately, they leafed out fine, so we'll see this coming spring.

The smaller two looked happy as clams. they bloomed fully, leafed out as though there wasn't a single problem.

Was this a size and protection thing? time may tell.

Where do you live at Wayne?

Prone to blight problems, with many past posts from various quarters asking why a redbud was dying back.

I've lost 2 or 3 to verticillium, and never lost a Japanese maple to vert., and they are susceptible as well.

I lost two western redbuds to VW many years before losing one JM in a garden with a dozen or more. btw, the redbuds were planted quite close to a Cotinus which is also highly susceptible to VW but it is still going strong - the maple was in another area of the garden altogether.

A very unpredictable pathogen.

Sara

How long did you have your little woody before you lost it?

What is the yearly growth rate of it?

I've never recognized it in my plantings except one time when some "black dirt" was delivered here and then some long established, spontaneous vine maples near the pile developed textbook Verticillium damage, complete with visible and distinct vascular blockages. Moving around of infested soil is said to be a main way it is spread.

Failed plantings of Japanese and other maples on the Island County site appeared to have bacterial blight instead. Part of the property where this has gone on for decades now receives cold air draining from the North, is damp and chilly in autumn - making it favorable for Pseudomonas.

A party with past industry involvement that posted at length for a time an another forum used to claim that some producers had a history of sloppy propagation practices resulting in grafted Japanese maples being sent out already infected with bacterial blight. Supposedly a typical syndrome was for the doomed plants to hold up long enough to be marketable, only to then fail on end consumers as the previously concealed infestations finally blossomed.

I think it was in for 3-4 years. It was slow - can't remember exactly, but quite manageable. It had a much prettier shape than the species and did not seem prone to the crossed=branching habit that the species exhibits.

Honestly, I haven't ever witnessed a redbud that I didn't like, and I have never seen one succumb to wilt (but that is specific to your area and soil). Right now I have 4 of the regular species. Beautiful trees. I know some of the common cultivars and have witnessed them in plantings, but I never have enough money to buy them. I will probably see what they have on sale at lowes in the spring.

I recognize this is an old thread but hoping somebody could share a picture of their little Woody both in bloom and with the crinkled leaves.