What is wrong with this tree?

This is a Japanese Maple (one of my favorite trees). The leaves are coming in thickly in close, but the extremities are without leaves.

The extremities are soft and don't snap...but alas, there are no leaves...and the leaves that are coming out are close to the branches and not on the existing twigs.

What is wrong (other than the obvious misfortunate of being located in :rolleyes:OUR:rolleyes: yard - all cycling and no time for gardening makes this tree a poor unfortunate for sure):eek::eek:? Should I just strategically prune it?

http://i202.photobucket.com/albums/a...3/b10b5ce3.jpg

Did you have a lot of freeze/thaw late winter/early spring? A warm spell in mid-to-late-winter followed by a freeze can cause this kind of damage.

Sunscald is a problem for Japanese maples too, though I'm not sure it could cause that kind of damage.

There are a bunch of diseases that can cause twig (and branch) dieback, the one that gets blamed most frequently is verticillium wilt.

You might consider consulting a local extension agent for more help. YOu could cut off some of the damaged material and get it looked at, VW usually leaves a dark streak or ring in infected material. Burn any possibly infected material and sterilize your pruning tools before you use them on other plants or you may spread a disease if one is present.

You'll see some small brown leaves near the bricks resulting from sun scald and the heat reflection last summer.

We didn't have a serious freeze/thaw (our other Japanese Maples are doing fine) in the spring. We did have a very harsh winter - but most of the damage was falling/broken branches.

Looks to me like it just got hit by a late freeze - if you are past your frost date, go ahead and cut off the sections that are not leafing out.

yeah, a hard freeze in season wouldn't do that. What happens is if you have a warm spell mid-winter, after the trees have "gone to sleep", the sap will start to rise early. Then when there's a hard freeze it will kill the more tender, less hardy newer growth, or at least damage it sufficiently so that it won't put out leaf buds. Eventually the twigs will die and they'll snap off without too much trouble.

We had a warm spell followed by a very sudden, VERY hard freeze one year when I was living in Portland, where they typically get fairly mild winters. This was VERY cold, way below freezing. The trees were full of sap and when the temp dropped to below zero in just a few hours, all that moisture in the tree limbs suddenly froze and expanded. Trees were literally exploding. It sounded like a constant barrage of gunfire. It was really something.

I've heard of that happening. I really can't imagine the sound - must be surreal.

My Japanese Maple looked like this 2 years ago after it pretended to be Spring for a good month - it had almost fully leafed out, and then on Easter weekend we had two nights in the 20s and more snow than we'd seen all winter!

The poor tree had it rough that year as after that freeze, we had the drought and were not allowed to water. I was doling out cupfuls of grey water from showering/washing dishes to nurse all my plants along.

Hmmm, I had a Foster Holly do the same thing in a drought...and it rejuvenated after a year. I wonder if that's the problem here...delayed damage from the summer drought??

It might be. Japanese maples are very sensitive to drought.

When was the last time you gave it a good pruning? Not now probably as it's leafing out but later. :cool:

The freeze of Easter weekend in 2007 got my Japanese Maples, too. They are still recovering after the next two summers ('07-'08) with drought. The trees have leafed out completely now, but there are still remnants of the freeze that look just like your tree, bare branches. Mine have gradually dried and broken off. They are pretty big to prune, so we just let it go. The wind will break off these twigs eventually, I think, but the suggestion to prune those twiggy, bare things was a good one, though you might want to wait a bit longer to be sure that they do not leaf out any more.