Why do believe that the tree was planted too deeply? The fact that you can see surface roots, seems to me, that depth is fine. Based on the picture, it even looks to be planted higher than the surrounding ground. I am also not sure why you want to cut out the roots with a saw. The tree looks happy; I'd leave well enough alone. Maybe I'm missing something here.

I am glad I was wrong. I also have a Japanese Maple and I see just one main root on it. I thought all trees should look like that. Thank you!

Aleksandra

I would hose that area down around by the trunk to see if there are any girdling roots. tree that size with lack of any root flair does indicate it's planted too deep but I wouldn't do anything but check for girdlers at this point

I did hose it down and I think these are girdling roots. Can you please verify. I took some more photos. There is no flare visible.

It looks like a tree that when planted was planted with a dike creating a basin around it so the newly planted tree could get plenty of water, and the dike was never removed and slowly eroded.

We had an oak planted by a professional tree company. They created a basin I watered as instructed, and the tree grew beautifully. I was negligent in removing the berm and the tree roots had started growing up into the berm. I removed the berm, and dug down so the roots were in the ground. The tree has nearly doubled in height in the 6 years since planted.

Thank you so very much! We have 2 sweetgums trees that had a similar problem but not to such an extent. One of the sweetgums lost all of its leaves in just one day last summer. After doing research I decided those roots must be the problem. I removed some roots and soil, mulched and now can't stop admiring them. Instead of a mass of roots there is just clean mulch. I was hoping to get the same result with this one.

I will probably wait until fall to prune some roots, as Toronado suggested, and for now I will remove the bricks, which were supposed to go anyway.

I hope I didn't do any damage to sweetgums, I pruned them about 2 weeks ago.

Again, thank you very very much for your suggestions. This is such an awesome forum!

Aleksandra

Good luck. I like swetgums. Let us know how it goes.

fill the bricks with a large course mulch and forget about it???

are you creating a problem.. or reacting to one??? .. if the tree is otherwise healthy ... why are you 'fixing' it??

just offer such.. for you to think outside your box?

ken

thank you Ken for your input... unfortunately I am a perfectionist :( ... I hate hate HATE those messy roots...

Aleksandra