Tree & Shrub Care

The plants that came with the house

A lot of Suffield properties have foundation plantings older than their owners — boxwood along the front, a hemlock hedge on the property line, euonymus that has been there since someone’s grandmother put it in. Those plants are worth more than a season of fertilizer, and they fail slowly enough that the problem is usually well established before anyone notices.

So we scout by name. Boxwood for leafminer and blight, hemlock for woolly adelgid, euonymus for scale, birch and maple for borers and mites. Dormant oil in early spring, applied while the plant is still closed up, prevents most of what a rescue spray in July is trying to undo.

What the program looks like

• Dormant horticultural oil before bud break
• Named-species scouting on every visit — boxwood, hemlock, euonymus, birch, maple
• Scale, mite, adelgid and leafminer treatment on a threshold, not a schedule
• Deep-root fertilization for mature shade trees in compacted or turf-competing soil
• Mulch depth and trunk-flare checks — over-mulching kills more shrubs than insects do
• No applications over beds in bloom, for the pollinators’ sake

Beds are part of the tick barrier too

Mulched beds against a warm foundation are shaded, humid and full of leaf litter — the most reliably tick-positive spot on a property after the woodline. When you have both programs, the bed lines are covered in the tick barrier at no extra pass.