Tree Health & Plant Care
A dying tree is telling you something. Usually it's about the roots, the soil, or something that moved into the neighborhood — and often it's fixable if you catch it in time.
What's actually killing trees in the Mid-South
Memphis-area trees deal with a specific set of problems, and after twenty-five years here we've seen all of them repeatedly:
- Emerald ash borer. Shelby County and the surrounding region are inside the infestation. Untreated ash trees die — it's a matter of when. Treatment works, but it has to start before the canopy is more than about a third gone. If you have an ash you care about, this is time-sensitive.
- Hypoxylon canker. Silvery-tan patches where bark has sloughed off oaks. It's an opportunist that takes drought-stressed and root-damaged trees. By the time you see it, the tree is usually structurally compromised — this is a removal call, not a treatment call.
- Bacterial leaf scorch. Browning leaf margins with a yellow halo, starting mid-summer and coming back worse each year. Common in pin and willow oaks across older Memphis neighborhoods.
- Crepe myrtle bark scale. White felty specks on the bark, then black sooty mold over everything under it. Treatable and very common here.
- Pine bark beetles. Popcorn-sized pitch tubes on the trunk. Fast and usually fatal — remove infested trees quickly so they don't seed the neighbors.
- Ambrosia beetles. Toothpick-like strands of sawdust protruding from young trunks in spring.
- Compaction and grade change. The quiet killer. Fill dirt over the root flare or heavy equipment parked in the root zone during construction will kill a mature oak — three years later, with no obvious cause.
Clay soil is the underlying problem for most of it
Much of the Memphis area sits on heavy clay. It holds water in spring, sets like concrete in an August drought, and it compacts badly. Tree roots aren't deep taproots — they're a wide, shallow plate, most of it in the top 18 inches, and that's exactly the zone we drive on, build on, and pile mulch onto.
A lot of "disease" calls turn out to be root problems: a mulch volcano burying the root flare, an irrigation system keeping the crown wet, a driveway poured over half the root plate. We look at the base of the tree before we look at the leaves.
What’s included
- On-site diagnosis of decline, dieback and canopy thinning
- Emerald ash borer treatment and ash preservation
- Insect and disease management
- Deep root fertilization for stressed and construction-damaged trees
- Soil decompaction and root zone improvement
- Honest verdicts — we'll tell you when a tree isn't worth saving
Tree down? Limb on the house? We roll 24/7 across the Mid-South.
Call (901) 461-6075 NowTree Health Care — common questions
Can my ash tree be saved?
If it still has most of its canopy, usually yes, with a treatment program. Once decline passes roughly 30–50%, treatment stops being worth the money and it becomes a removal — and dead ash gets brittle and dangerous to climb fast.
What's the white stuff on my crape myrtle?
Almost certainly crepe myrtle bark scale. It's treatable. The black coating underneath is sooty mold growing on the honeydew, and it clears up once the scale is handled.
Why is my tree dying on one side?
Usually root damage on that side — a trench, a driveway, a utility cut — or a vascular disease. Worth a look before you remove it.
Do you do lawn care too?
We stay in our lane: trees and the ground around them. We'd rather refer you to somebody good than pretend.
Need tree health care? Let us get you a number.
Most quotes go out the same day you call. Storm and hazard work gets priority dispatch. Straight pricing, written estimate, and a yard that looks like we were never there.
(901) 461-6075