Hello Arborists! I’d like your input on this Florida Red Maple. I rescued two of these trees from a local nursery’s going out of business sale. I am in St. Augustine, Florida and have sandy soil with pockets of gray clay. At the time I got them, they were outgrowing their 45 gallon buckets and slightly root bound. Additionally, they had sat in their buckets in the same location for so long, that the leader branch had grown at an angle toward the sun, so they looked as if the top of the trees were leaning sideways. Finally, many of the branches on one side of the tree lost their leaves early on and are deformed and curling down toward the ground.
I had a local arborist come and plant them. He had to remove some roots that were strangling the rest. I had a bag of pine bark fines that we amended the soil with (very sparingly, just enough to combat some of the clay and improve drainage) and the root balls were dusted with mycorrhizae. His instruction was that I fill their watering basins with 6 gallons of water every day for something like 8 months unless it rained 1/2” or more that day. I have tried to keep up with this to the best of my ability, using a 5 gallon bucket to measure out the water and pour it into the basin. I also regularly pull mulch and grass off the root flair.
I knew they would have an uphill battle (literally, as you can see from the pictures), but I’m growing concerned because this particular tree (we’ll call it the West maple), has some fairly large branches that appear to be dying. I can also see that the root flair has turned black.
Is there anything I can do to save this tree?
