PSA: Stop planting trees with root flare buried - saw 3 new developments with this mistake

Walked through a new housing complex near Austin yesterday and counted 12 maples planted with soil piled up the trunk like a volcano. People do this because they think it looks neat. But you're basically strangling the tree before it gets a chance. I dug down on one of them and the bark was already rotting after just 6 months. Got any tricks for convincing landscapers to stop this?

3 comments

3 Comments

janah831mo ago

Ugh yes, I see this constantly in new developments near me too! It drives me absolutely insane, they take a perfectly good tree and just bury the root flare like it's some kind of decorative mound. I actually dug up a crepe myrtle in my own yard that was planted that way by the previous owner, and the trunk was already soft and discolored right at the soil line after just one summer. The worst part is landscapers think they're being neat and tidy when really they're just slowly killing everything they plant. I don't know why it's so hard to just plant at the right depth, it's not complicated!

the_anthony1mo ago

Man that crew foreman sounds like he didn't care one bit... did your buddy ever see trees die from that deep planting?

wilson.joseph1mo ago

Saw a crew in my neighborhood do this exact thing to a row of oaks last spring, @janah83, and when I pointed it out the foreman told me "that's just how we always do it." Had a buddy who used to work tree planting crews and he said they got paid by the tree, not the survival rate.