Beech / Fagus

[PieterVE]

So me and a friend had the good fortune to acquire some trees from an older guy who retired and sold his house, garden and all his trees to go live in an appartment at the Belgian coast.

This is one of the larger hornbeams, in some sort of blue container, where the tree was not ankered in, and moved around a bit at transport.

The aim here was to see the state of the roots, as we allready found out the older gentlemen was not fond of rootwork. All his trees are also planted in some dark, sandy soil.

The coming weeks I'll post more repotting of these trees to asses roots and trying to plan rootwork for the coming years.

With this Hornbeam we also did some first pruning to correct a lot of too heavy branches allover the tree.

I do not have better pictures of the 'before' but I will document more from now on.

 

[Forsoothe!]

That's a lot of root removal...

 

[PieterVE]

That's a lot of root removal...

Not so much as you think, we did remove black dead roots from the underside, some of the thicker ones with no feeder roots on, and tried even to graft a smaller root to one of the thicker as you can see in the picture. At the end about 80-85% of roots are still there.

Honestly, the trees were cheap but there is a lot of rootwork to be done the next years ! But, they are nice projects.

I will graft next year new seedlings to the sides where no roots are now, but first I want to see how the tree reacts in the new soil.

 

[PieterVE]

Well, made a mistake, this tree is a Beech/fagus, so I asked to change the thread title to be correct with the tree

 

[PieterVE]

The tree regained its energy this spring, and I pinched it all around, so now there are new shoots all over, happy tree me thinks

 

[Cruiser]

Nice material!