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A 30-year-old maple came down in my neighbor's yard last spring and I learned something about root decay I never knew before
I pulled up a soil core near the base and found a root rot fungus called Armillaria that had been spreading underground for years. The article I read from the local extension office said it can travel through root grafts between trees without any above-ground signs. Has anyone else dealt with Armillaria in mature maples?
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kai91411d ago
Kind of like me with my lawn mower - no visible problems until the wheel literally fell off mid-mow last summer. With Armillaria though, I've read it can travel through roots like a fungal subway system underground. My neighbor had a massive silver maple that looked totally fine up top, but when we finally cut it down two years ago, the entire root crown was just spongy mush with that honey mushroom smell. He kept saying "it's been leaning for twenty years and it's still standing" right up until it took out his fence and part of his garage roof.
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amy15411d ago
I mean, is it really that big of a deal? My neighbor had a maple with some weird root stuff going on for like a decade and it never fell over. Armillaria is everywhere around here, in basically every dead stump and old root. Unless you've got a tree already weak from something else, odds are it'll be fine for years. People get all worked up over every little fungus they find in the dirt, but half the time the tree just keeps growing anyway.
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