What are the basic components a tree needs to be healthy? My son was asked this in first grade last year for Arbor Day, which made me go back to the fundamentals. In general, plants need sunlight, air, water and [...]

What is soil? One of the most important characteristics of soil that is often overlooked is the fact that soil is alive. It’s not just alive in the sense that living things are some byproducts of soil or are simply [...]

OK, but why soil? Take a minute to picture a tree. Maybe even grab a pen right now and draw one out in the margin – I’ll wait. Some things you might note are the canopy shape, leaf-on or leaf-off, [...]

The name northern tooth, Climacodon septentrionalis, a common trunk decay fungus of urban maples, is a misnomer. The decay fungus is actually widely distributed in North America east of the Rockies and is found as far south as the Gulf [...]

A dirty dozen or so families of sucking insects are key pests of woody plants. Who are these sucking insects? Suckers belong to a large clan of insects called Hemiptera. More than 10,000 species of Hemiptera are found in North [...]