[tommycahir]

Hi All

I am in need of some advice from people here, I planted some Laurel hedging last December and I have noticed over the last couple of weeks (6-8 ) that the leaves are turning a shade of brown and some of the plants have even lost all of their leaves.

I first thought that this could be due to adverse weather conditions we had shortly after I planted them but I have not seen any improvement in them over the last couple of good weeks that we have had.

I have been that basically all we can do is take off the dead leaves..keep them watered..don't put anymore fertilizer on it and make sure they not too wet or too dry and that they should sprout up again "hopefully"

Anybody here got any other advice?

I have attached 2 pictures of the plants below and would welcome any advice anybody has in regards this issue.

[Sive]

HI Tommy, I hope you don't have too much of this hedging....it looks terribly like a problem we had with a short length of hedging.....and when we dug out one of the plants we realised the clay soil was very compacted underneath the plants and the roots had nowhere to go......it also meant the plants were probably sitting in water when we got some of our deluges.
So we lifted them, dug a deeper trench with plenty of compost/manure etc and they recovered beautifully.
Funnily enough, I notice the odd leaf looking yellowish again, so I'm going to try giving it some fertiliser high in Nitrogen.......
I thought laurels were tough as old boots....I didn't expect to have any problems, but as ever with gardening, you learn by experience.

[tommycahir]

Unfortunately I have 150 plants of it


digging it all out and putting in a trench of manure and compost is last thing that I wanna be doing with that amount of it. I have already given it a feed with fertilizer (forget the ratios in it now) and that hasn't helped it either

I might dig one or 2 up later and have a look at the roots to see if they are as you suggest compacted.

thanks for the reply.

[Foxylock]

How's the drainage I lost quite a few laurel around a broken drain where the neighbours water ran in and pooled on my side. It's quite frustrating to have this happen.

[michael brenock]

looks like root suffocation, no air can get at the roots because of soil structure. if the soil was worked while wet and then compacted it settles into a solid mass where air cannot move. At this late stage it might be possible to salvage the situation but you have a lot of plants to move. make a small mound of earth from a different part of the garden with good structure, for each plant and then lift each plant into the new situation. it is not a weather condition frost or cold winds, neither is it fertility. The buds have failed to develop because of lack of root pressure. it is too late to try one plant and wait. Hope this is helpful.
michael brenock horticultural advisor (retired)

[posiedon]

i have a question on laurels and their interaction with some trees nearby.

we have a line of laurels lining the side of the property and we also put in some trees, mountain ash, silver birch, red maple. the tress running down the side of the property next to the laurels just dont seem to be thriving like their counterparts elsewhere on the site. in fact the silver birch budded. leaves opened and then they all died off.

are the laurels robbing the rots of the trees of water etc?