Boxwood

Over the past few weeks I have been on a project that involved boxwoods - moving them, relocating them to a holding bed and replanting some for a formal,historic garden. We thought we were home free (ish) - all of them seem to be surviving. The last Friday I went down and -eek - one had red leaves on it. This is not good. The next one had gooey gunk on the internal stems. I took some samples and took them into the Extention office where we found the the gunk was a soft scab thing that looks really interesting under the microscope Not tough the address and treat.

The red is more problematic. I had the wonderful honor of telling the property supervisor that if the red was a virus, we might not only loose that boxwood, but we could not replant another one where this one had been, and oh, by the way, we might loose more if it has been transmitted from the holding bed, or to other boxwoods in the garden. If the red is from soil borne phytopthera then we have a real problem.

Fortunately the roots do not look black and soggy, but we will not know until the soil/root samples are seen by the local university testing lab.