How to Treat the Coast Live Oak

Alright, this is Blair Glenn. I am the owner of Saratoga Tree Service and I am a United States Certified Arborist. I would like to talk a little bit today about the coast live oak. There is a close up of the leaves of the live oak. As you can see, the ends are chewed on by one of the many leaf eating insects that attack this trees. The live oak can get quite large. This particular specimen is very unusual because it was growing in a very rocky, very, very dry hillside mountain. This one is actually out in Almaden Valley up high, so it is a lot larger or a lot older than it looks because in essence, it is like a big bonsai in a very harsh environment. Because of the development here, we put rocks all way around the base of it instead of a fence and filled it in with chips to try to encourage this tree to be a better specimen with a little bit of care. I am a little bit concerned though, because as old as this tree is, it got some old age problems and improving the health of the tree might lead to some lymph failures. This picture is cool, the live oak that you see in this picture is, I am going to guess about 20 years old. This picture was taken in 1918, the same house is there today and the same tree is still there. And here it is today. This tree is over a hundred years of old, probably a hundred and ten but interestingly, the house is still there. You can see where the old dirt road used to be and, it is turned into a magnificent specimen. A lot of these really old live oak trees have been worked on for generation after generation and a lot of them are fully rotted out and ready to explode. This is a real sad example of a tree that has been babied along for a long, long time and it finally just gave up and explodes and it felt apart. There was very little holding wood on this. It was all rotten and even the wood that was keeping the tree alive was starting to decay but amazingly, the tree was as full as green as you could imagine. So from a distance, one would assume or assert that this tree would indeed healthy. But that would be the farthest thing from my mind because I recognized that the tree had a lot of hollow spots and a lot of decay. What is difficult is for me to explain to our home owner that they are perfectly, healthy, looking tree that maybe full and green might be ready for a disaster such as what you see here. Another big problem that we have to deal with is the impact from construction. Here is a new development site where they are trying to protect the roots by putting a root protection zone, a fence around the tree. Unfortunately, the majority of the roots are way beyond this fence line. I would like to wrap this up by talking a little bit about the sensitivity that many of our live oaks have to construction impact. Trenching dirt on this soil, there is multiple things going on here. Not only are they cutting this trench but they are piling up mountains of dirt that are compressing and compacting the soil. Everything that you do to our root zone of an oak tree is going to have a long term impact and shorten its life. You are not going to see the results of this damage for five maybe even up to 10 years, but if you want to have a live oak tree that would be a long live tree that will be a benefit and an asset to your landscape, you certainly have to protect the root system. Thanks for taking the time to watch this brief presentation. Once Again my name is Blair Glenn. I am the owner of Saratoga Tree Service and an ISA Certified Arborist.