People new to gardening sometimes assume that if a tree is 'evergreen' it does not drop its leaves ... ever. But although evergreens always have green leaves they are not always the SAME green leaves. It has to have a supply of new ones sometime! Holly leaves will come to the end of their natural life, sicken and die. Older leaves will fall prey to fungi and bugs then fall. This is natural. A tree is a living thing and is constantly changing. Also bear in mind that if you eradicate every bug from your plants(not that you can) you will also go a long way towards removing other creatures, including birds, from your garden.

e.g. .... when you grow plants in the house ... you have to HARDEN them off to sunlight ... acclimate them .... you cant just throw them in strong sun .. you did basically the same thing ... by removing the shading tree ... you changed the ambient light.. and it has had an impact ... otherwise.. after a month of 6 inches of rain.. and a very cold may ... i had 3 days over 100 ... and the rest of the week over 85 ... i have much similar damage ... and its what i call scorch ... you left ambient weather out of your facts.. or i missed it ... regardless.. there is nothing to do about it.. unless you just want to clip a few of the leaves off.. just to reduce the visual impact .. and i dont mean taking off limbs... unless for other reasons.. you might be surprised.. that just taking a very few.. will make the problem almost disappear ... i do it on hosta clumps all the time ... ken

Thanks a lot for the advise! It helps greatly to know what I'm dealing with. The planting bed these are in are primarily for fruit trees. I am adding flowers to make it prettier. This particular planting bed gets a lot of volume of runoff water during storms. The soil is very fast draining - I have sugar sand soil, and I actually have to amend it with compost so the edibles get enough nutrients. So adding additional sand wouldn't change anything - it is nearly all sand already. It is very interesting, I am finding that here in FL that there are some plants that can take quite a lot of moisture if they have a cool root run (here that means shade), but absolutely cannot tolerate hot+damp roots. Hippeastrums seem to be one of them. Another is agapanthus. I have hippis in other spots of my yard that get just as much storm water runnoff, but they are in shade, which seems to make a large difference. This particular one I think was a belated casualty of hurricane Sandy, which dumped quite a lot of rain as it passed. On the plus side, rain lilies seem to flourish in this location, in fact my candidas are still blooming even this late in the year! They like the periodic drenchings. I've moved what is left of those seedlings to a spot agapanthus does well in, so hopefully they will do better now. I was worried that if it was an insect that moving them might spread the problem. If it is a drainage problem, then moving them should be safe. Thanks for the help!

Thank you for your reply. Did a few google searches and the fungus looks like residue caused by a number of pests. So area will be treated with an insecticide before new plants go in. Black bugs may have been there to take advantage of the residue but the tree, cuttings, fungus and bugs are all gone now. Wanted to check as there is still another tree - possibly a crab apple tree (produces ornamental fruit) - that was always bigger and stronger that doesn't seem to be affected but is attracting the local ants for some reason.