Is the tree killing my plants

Wizwoo

Hello All,

Hope someone out there can help with this one. About 15 ft behind our garden fence (in our neighbour's garden) is a very large sycamore (bigger than our house) and it's covered by a tree preservation order. It's a lovely tree but the plants in the flower bed that we have in front of the fence don't do well at all.

Our soil is clay (very heavy) although that particular bed isn't that bad. Every year we've added feed and a compost mulch. We bought a beautiful Rowan, the leaves of which turned an amazing colour in winter - it died after just 3 years. We planted bamboo about 18 months ago (hoping that it might help with the road noise) and that's gone to flower (it looks like it's dying!).

The thing is I don't want to throw my money away by planting anything else there if it's going to die.

Any advice - could I be doing more? Or should I just give up with that spot?

MrsMW

It may be that the tree is taking all the water. We also have very heavy clay soil which in summer dries really quickly. I would try digging in loads of rotted manure or mushroom compost or similar before you plant anything and then making sure that the plants are well watered in dry weather, HTH.

Wizwoo

Thanks for that MrsMW.

Would I be better off looking for plants that are drought tolerant? will they cope with the clay soil?

Wizwoo

Welcome J_C - nice to see your finding your way round MSE.

Tree isn't mine to cut done plus it's protected - would make a load of benches though!

jenniferpa

Sycamores have very strong agressive root systems and it's probably sucking all the moisture out of the soil, quite apart from any shade issue and the fact that the dense canopy will probably be stopping much moisture from reaching the soil anyway. Would it be possible to construct a raised bed at this point? The advantage of that is you can really ammend the soil, leaving you only watering to worry about. Rowan needs quite a lot of moisture so I think that's probably why it died. Bamboo - in a way you have to hope that that is going to die! Although there are various cultivars, most of them travel underground and send up viciously sharp shoots in the most unlikely places, and it can be almost impossible to irradicate once it takes hold.

Jennifer

looby75

jenniferpa wrote:

Although there are various cultivars, most of them travel underground and send up viciously sharp shoots in the most unlikely places, and it can be almost impossible to irradicate once it takes hold.

Jennifer

I can vouch for that being true...my next door neighbour has bamboo in her garden....guess who else has it in hers, even though I have never bought it or wanted it :mad:

jenniferpa

I think, unless you have a pet panda to feed, the stuff should be banned.:o
Alternatively, you should have to get a license to plant it, with a massive fee to compensate your neighbours, unless it's the non-spreading kind.

Jennifer

looby75

Oh I agree with you there. the most maddening thing is when my neighbour first got her bamboo it was in a big pot on her patio and it looked lovely for about 2 years, she was warned by the neighbour on the other side of her not to put it in the ground as it would spread like wildfire and he didn't really want bamboo in his garden. So what did she do....put it in the ground on the side of the garden closest to my house. I was NOT impressed.

pennineman

I offer you sympathy wizwoo. We suffer sycamore blight over our tiny front garden. It has two sycamores on the west side about 6 feet from the boundary and two on the north side about 3 feet from the boundary!

They cover everything in our garden with that horrible sticky sap. Our plants get covered, our garden walls and gates, and our cars. Yuk!

It hasn't started yet as they haven't broken into leaf - we're a little behind being 950 feet up in the hills.

The two on the west side were pollarded two years ago. Instant joy! Plants grew better and there was less sticky on everything.

Over the 30 years we've been here we've tried all sorts in the garden and now we just grow what will tolerate the shade and sticky yuk.

But nothing does as well as if we have the same plants in the back garden which is much more open.

Sorry if this doesn't help much - I'm just saying it could be worse.

Wizwoo

The same neighbour has loads of bamboo too - it's about 9 - 10 ft high (ours is only about 5 - 6 foot).
The thing with the sycamore too is that there is a huge amount of ivy up the trunk always full of little flies and other insects.

Can you suggest any plants that do OK with you pennineman?

HKP_2

Wizwoo wrote:

Any advice - could I be doing more? Or should I just give up with that spot?

If all else fails. Give up.
Get some containers/tubs and grow from those instead. Sometimes you just cant win, so you have to find an alternative. Had the same problem as you in a way. Coudnt get anything to grow in a particular spot. Just wasted loads of money on plants. Gave up. Got containers and all is well again in the garden. May not be the answer your looking for, sorry.