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Help my weeping cherry!


RaceFan14

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Wow! I think Bon has it right you are under fungal attack. The wet weather and the suddenness of the decline all point to a fungus. I'd clean up all of the diseased leaves and any dead branches and bag them. Dip your pruners in a 10% chlorine bleach solution between cuts to keep the disease from spreading.  You can try spraying with a fungicide and if the tree makes it through the winter start spraying again as the leaves unfurl in the spring. Fungicides work best as a preventive measure. If the tree is still alive in the spring, and it may be as most fungi attack just the leaves, and the weather isn't as wet as it was this year it might be OK. Remove any diseased leaves next year and keep spraying. 

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WOW - sorry to say - but it does look like it went from "weeping" to "dying".  When you break a piece of the branch, is it dry and brittle?  Did you see any worms (like May saw worm) or caterpillars (like tent worm) or beetles (like Japanese beetle) on it this spring or summer?  Still, dying that quickly, it almost looks like someone sprayed it with a brush killer. Hopefully you can get a new one at an end of season sale at a local nursery and replace it. 

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Depending on where you live I can stop by and do a Master Gardener call.  We don't always do that but for a high value tree I would do it. It's a service provided free by Penn State University.  It may be that it can be saved.  I wouldn't be spraying it just because you "think" it could be a fungus.

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If you want to go organic you can try neem oil otherwise just get a broad spectrum fungicide. Make sure it is good for cherry leaf spot. http://www.caf.wvu.edu/kearneysville/disease_descriptions/omchlfsp.html  This is the most common fungus disease of cherry trees. You can check for the characteristic purple spots but that tree looks too far gone to see anything. You can try, though. The only way to diagnose it for certain is to put the fungus under a microscope and check the spores and sporangia if present. They are characteristic of different fungi and maybe you would need a mycologist to or plant disease expert to differentiate depending on how much they vary. I can do mushrooms but this is a little bit outside my range of fungi. 

 

ps I found my fungicide. Ii is Ortho formerly known as Daconil. It works for what I use it for (black spot and soot mold) but I've never tried it on a weeping cherry. 

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WOW - sorry to say - but it does look like it went from "weeping" to "dying".  When you break a piece of the branch, is it dry and brittle?  Did you see any worms (like May saw worm) or caterpillars (like tent worm) or beetles (like Japanese beetle) on it this spring or summer?  Still, dying that quickly, it almost looks like someone sprayed it with a brush killer. Hopefully you can get a new one at an end of season sale at a local nursery and replace it. 

Never thought of brush killer. That's murder! Do you think that a tree could be sprayed like that without getting any of the other stuff that is growing there? I've done it to multiflora roses but I cut them way back first. 

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Some plants are much more sensitive to herbicides and if that's what it turns out to be then it could have come for quite a distance away.  Glyphosate is turning out to be much more toxic than we were told.  In time it may turn out to be the DDT of our time but only time and lots of independent study will tell the tale.

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I'm not sure if the little bits of greenery in the tree are new growth or weeds poking up through.  If I don't have a diagnosis by tomorrow then it will go to the Penn State lab.  Then we will have an exact cause and hopefully treatment.

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got hit by lightning, leaves all died within a few days. This year whole thig is dead.

That's interesting. You learn something new every day. How tall was it? We have lilacs that are the size of small trees so why not a lightening strike?

 

I suppose that  without a piece of it to look at all we can do is guess. I hope the poster now has enough information to make an educated guess after comparing the tree to some of our suggestions.  

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