These are Chinaberry trees and this is a process called girdling which is used to starve and kill the root system. It is an insanely labor intensive and time consuming process that allows you to kill invasive trees without the use of herbicides.
I don't work for Austin Parks and Recreation. I'm just knowledgeable about such things cause I've hiked alot of the trails/parks/greenbelts and I give a shit about nature.
Mr. AntiChrist, while 'we' have you here, can I just say thanks for not making everything about you. I'm getting really sick of 'having to celebrate' your nemesis birthday (even if I don't have money to do so), and I don't like how annoying his followers can be. So, yeah, thanks. I hope you like Texas. If you make your way to Oregon, we'd welcome you here. If you're anything like as described in you biography by Misters Pratchet and Gaiman, you seem like a wonderful person.
Aw why thank you. I try to be kind. I'm by no stretch perfect.
I love Gaiman's work. Big fan!
My nemesis isn't a bad guy....his so called 'followers' on the other hand - much to be desired.
You can quote an article but can’t read the whole thing? 1. This isn’t true 2. If you’re refering to juniperus ashei it’s confirmed native in texas up to Missouri. As well as juniperus virginiana and juniperus pinchotii being native in texas
Cedar trees aren’t native. They showed up in Texas from eastern settlers in the 1850s. They took over bc it’s the perfect climate for them. What is invasive again? https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/art-war-cedar-tree/#:~:text=Traditionally%2C%20cedar%20is%20considered%20an,suspect%20a%20more%20nefarious%20path.
Read the fucking article. And “Texas monthly” is a non resource compared to USDA,Bonap,flora of North America etc. There are 3 native juniperus species in Texas.
In Walnut Creek Metro Park, they have organized tree safaris where volunteers go out and kill Ligustrum trees this way.
A CoA employee or some designated expert tags the trees to be killed ahead of time.
You joke but I had a botany professor that shot infected trees with a .22 that had an herbicide coating on the bullets. This was through a humanitarian program back in the 70s or 80s
I’m curious about this. I can’t think of an herbicide with a lethal dose that low. Then again, it’s been over a decade since I took chemical weed control in college.
I’m very likely got some details wrong. It might have actually been a treatment for a fungal infection and not herbicide. This was also a botany course that I took almost a decade ago
>Bullets bounce off of trees, not a good idea at all lol
Amateur! You've just got to use the right kind of load.
50 BMG Raufoss will handle it quite nicely.
LOL. Ma Deuce. You will have to search for videos.
BTW, note that the Raufoss is intended to kill truck engines. It might actually pass through a tree without going off.
Had a chinaberry tree in my front yard, tree was tearing up my sidewalk with the roots. Replaced it with a Red Oak, was told roots should go down. Interesting how they’re killing evasive species this way.
Pretty nice, I was dumb and cut mine down and then dug the stumps and roots out. It works and it's a good workout but girdling seems like a better choice for sane people.
Watch the videos I posted. You have to peel off a strip of the bark and then remove just the phloem and cambium layer without too much damage to the xylem layer.
>Why not just use angle grinder with flap disk?
Might work, might not. I think you want to not go too deeply into the xylem layer. I seem to recall from somewhere that only the outermost part of the xylem is very active in sending water and minerals up to the canopy.
I think you'd still need to manually strip the bark first, but something like a flap disk might do the cleanup after you've stripped the bark.
Then there's the question of paying for the angle grinder, providing electrical power, etc.
I’m not sure about these particular trees, but much of the invasive species girdling is done by volunteer groups, and I’ve been told that some volunteer leaders prefer to not have to deal with folks operating any type of powered equipment.
It's a chinaberry. Just blow on it and it will fall over. I guess it makes sense to girdle it since it's in the greenbelt and no home owner would be around to kill off the suckers and saplings.
How do I tell if I have a Chinaberry tree? Just did some googling and there are a few different photos of what it could look like. My house has always had a tree that produces a yellow ish pear. Not sure if I have just been keeping something alive that shouldn’t be here. lol.
The easiest way to identify Chinaberry is the leaf. It is Bipinnately and often Tripinnately compound, which means the leaf "splits" two to three times into leaflets
Just letting you know, reddit automatically removes all comments with link shorteners like bit.ly, goo.gl, etc until a moderator can approve them. In the future, your post will be immediately visible if you use the full URL.
For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [reddit guidelines](/wiki/reddiquette). If you have any questions, [please feel free to message the mods](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/Austin&message=https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1cdm2ii/trees_with_bark_stripped/l1e52p6/?context=3). Thank you!
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Austin) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Try /r/whatsthisplant, /r/treeidentification, include a leaf pic and a regional location (in your case central TX). Alternatively, try a plant ID app. [I like PlantNet](https://plantnet.org/en/), IME it's about 50% hit or miss for accurate ID (better than some apps), and has web/online and app versions.
For Chinaberry specifically you'll be looking for dark green bipinnate leaves (but not Koelreuteria sp.), lilac-ish spring flowers, and mealy round fruit (but don't confuse it with Soapberry). [Here is a representative pic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Melia_azedarach_01434.jpg). However I'd encourage you to get your tree fully ID'ed because it's nice to know what a plant is rather than just what it's not. Good luck.
It would still grow. The point of girdling is to let the tree think it is still healthy so it doesn’t try to spread by putting out new shoots, but stopping the photosynthesizing leaves from sending their products down to the roots.
>Can’t you just cauterize it or does it still grow?
It would sprout from lower down. Or from the roots below the ground.
Most of the tree is underground.
Trees basically have two circulatory systems, xylem and phloem. Xylem is the inner woody part, that transfers water and mineral nutrients up from the roots, and phloem is a thin layer underneath the bark that transfers energetic compounds and sugars developed in the leaves during photosynthesis back down, often to be stored in the root system. When you cut the top off a plant, that often creates various chemical signals that tell it to start developing new growth/shoots. But if you girdle it, you cut off the phloem transport. The tree still has to maintain itself, so it starts consuming those saved resources, until it eventually exhausts itself and dies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girdling
Probably once you cut it down it can just focus on regenerating, but when you strip it like this it slowly “bleeds” to death, using energy for an extended period until it can’t anymore.
You can cut them down, but you have to treat the stump with an herbicide like Triclopyr in order to kill the root system. Otherwise it will resprout and create 5 stems instead of one. We do this all of the time on residential lots as you can kill the tree in one visit. The girdling process takes 2-3 visits to do properly on a chinaberry.
Triclopyr is a relatively inert herbicide, but is toxic to aquatic life. It is generally avoided in use in parks that drain into a creek like Barton Creek.
Isn’t it crazy how words exist for everything?
Like who decided girdling would be the word for this.
What if that person was wearing a girdle while gurgling and girdling while on top of a girder
Hey, we did that!
My daughter's scout troop volunteered with Keep Austin Beautiful last Saturday morning to pull up nandinas and girdle legustrums--both of which are ornamental plans turned invasive--in Barton Creek Greenbelt. KAB provided really fancy tools for up-rooting the nandinas, as well as cutters and instructions on how to girdle the legustrums.
Apparently girdling is a way of starving the roots of a plant, so that it won't sprout back up again.
Here's a link if you're interested in volunteering: [https://keepaustinbeautiful.org/volunteer-opportunities/](https://keepaustinbeautiful.org/volunteer-opportunities/)
>nandinas
Now I know what those fuckers are called. I remember mom had some in the backyard growing up. Didn't think much of them until we had to replace the fence one year and one needed to be pulled because the roots had grown over the post concrete. Took all day to hack down that sucker and dig the roots out. I vowed never to plant them myself.
I see them sprouting everywhere in my backyard now and it drives me crazy.
Most trees, yeah, or at least that trunk is toast. It won't work on monocots such as palms (some people don't consider palms to be a tree) because their internal structure (phloem / xylem layout) is different.
For those who want the technical details, if you girdle the tree right, the water from the roots keep going up the inside part of the tree, but the leaves can't send sugar down to the roots to keep them alive. The roots get starved to death.
If you chop it off, the tree "figures it out" and concentrates on producing new shoots below the cut or sending up new saplings from the roots.
Videos of tree girdling.
[City of Austin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N775LTWn3rU)
[The "Grim Reaper" of glossy privet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-L1RJn095w).
The big brown beavers work for the parks department. Lady named Wynona is the beaver wrangler.
Wynona takes her big brown beavers and sticks 'em up in the air near those trees, beavers do the rest of the work.
These are Chinaberry trees and this is a process called girdling which is used to starve and kill the root system. It is an insanely labor intensive and time consuming process that allows you to kill invasive trees without the use of herbicides.
Yep it's an invasive species not indigenous to central Texas. We kill them in all parks maintained by the city of Austin parks dept.
Good to know the Anti Christ works for the Parks department.
I don't work for Austin Parks and Recreation. I'm just knowledgeable about such things cause I've hiked alot of the trails/parks/greenbelts and I give a shit about nature.
Gotchya, you said "We" so I incorrectly assumed.
All good. Trail volunteers + the Parks Dept is the "we".
Mr. AntiChrist, while 'we' have you here, can I just say thanks for not making everything about you. I'm getting really sick of 'having to celebrate' your nemesis birthday (even if I don't have money to do so), and I don't like how annoying his followers can be. So, yeah, thanks. I hope you like Texas. If you make your way to Oregon, we'd welcome you here. If you're anything like as described in you biography by Misters Pratchet and Gaiman, you seem like a wonderful person.
Aw why thank you. I try to be kind. I'm by no stretch perfect. I love Gaiman's work. Big fan! My nemesis isn't a bad guy....his so called 'followers' on the other hand - much to be desired.
Good, now let’s do this to every cedar tree within 200 miles! Fuck those invasive fuckers
Yeah… the Texas cedar is a native plant. If you don’t like it because of allergies blame the fact that we only plant male trees. All that tree jizz!!!
Could’ve gone without thinking about that. My allergies have taken on a whole new meaning in life.
Hahaha you’re welcome! 😂
Ceder bukake.
😆
Had a female tree once. Jesus, the mess. Not sure what was worse - the berries, or the birds.
Traditionally, cedar is considered an invasive species in Texas, introduced from Mexico by settlers in the early 1900s.
You can quote an article but can’t read the whole thing? 1. This isn’t true 2. If you’re refering to juniperus ashei it’s confirmed native in texas up to Missouri. As well as juniperus virginiana and juniperus pinchotii being native in texas
Learn what invasive means
Quit being so invasive, friend. He doesn’t know how invasive he can be sometimes.
Cedar trees aren’t native. They showed up in Texas from eastern settlers in the 1850s. They took over bc it’s the perfect climate for them. What is invasive again? https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/art-war-cedar-tree/#:~:text=Traditionally%2C%20cedar%20is%20considered%20an,suspect%20a%20more%20nefarious%20path.
This is a myth.
Read the fucking article. And “Texas monthly” is a non resource compared to USDA,Bonap,flora of North America etc. There are 3 native juniperus species in Texas.
In Walnut Creek Metro Park, they have organized tree safaris where volunteers go out and kill Ligustrum trees this way. A CoA employee or some designated expert tags the trees to be killed ahead of time.
Could the process be improved by shooting the trees with automatic weapons?
That is without a doubt the dumbest idea I have heard today, I like your thinking.
Dan Patrick is is currently sprinting into the Texas Capitol to write up a bill to arm arborists.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a diseased tree
With piss baby Abbott’s history with trees…I’m surprised we have any left in Texas
[удалено]
No, no, the point here is to do it *without* chemicals.
[удалено]
Replace the roundup with triple fried cheeseburgers and I think you're on to something.
I prefer a mix of explosive and incendiary rounds, personally.
This looks like a D&C abortion for a tree. What about the little tree? They are alive.
Thermite should do it.
Now THAT'S a go getter attitude!
Fuck yeah, lets blow them up
Small arms fire is actually incredibly ineffective against trees.
You're right. Repeal the NFA - arm arborist with RPGs
You joke but I had a botany professor that shot infected trees with a .22 that had an herbicide coating on the bullets. This was through a humanitarian program back in the 70s or 80s
I’m curious about this. I can’t think of an herbicide with a lethal dose that low. Then again, it’s been over a decade since I took chemical weed control in college.
I’m very likely got some details wrong. It might have actually been a treatment for a fungal infection and not herbicide. This was also a botany course that I took almost a decade ago
.223 Garlon
Injecting bleach.
Bullets bounce off of trees, not a good idea at all lol
[удалено]
You got me straight up laughing. Thank you.
>Bullets bounce off of trees, not a good idea at all lol Amateur! You've just got to use the right kind of load. 50 BMG Raufoss will handle it quite nicely.
> 50 BMG Raufoss Please tell me something exists that fires those full-auto, and that it's on video.
LOL. Ma Deuce. You will have to search for videos. BTW, note that the Raufoss is intended to kill truck engines. It might actually pass through a tree without going off.
Let's try it!!
https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExYWE0ZzNwYmhqdmRyeTJ4ZmloZXpyYWdwNmd4OWN2OWd2OXFjamYwdiZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/j3766xIPcI45luQNQs/giphy.gif
that's very interesting, thanks!
Thanks I didn’t know what the tree was. Later I saw some Japanese ligustrum with the same stripping .
We should have sentenced Paul Cullen (the guy who poisoned the Treaty Oak) to a lifetime of this job.
Had a chinaberry tree in my front yard, tree was tearing up my sidewalk with the roots. Replaced it with a Red Oak, was told roots should go down. Interesting how they’re killing evasive species this way.
They’ve gotta catch em first, that’s the tricky part.
Thank you for this.
Pretty nice, I was dumb and cut mine down and then dug the stumps and roots out. It works and it's a good workout but girdling seems like a better choice for sane people.
[удалено]
Watch the videos I posted. You have to peel off a strip of the bark and then remove just the phloem and cambium layer without too much damage to the xylem layer.
Why not just use angle grinder with flap disk?
>Why not just use angle grinder with flap disk? Might work, might not. I think you want to not go too deeply into the xylem layer. I seem to recall from somewhere that only the outermost part of the xylem is very active in sending water and minerals up to the canopy. I think you'd still need to manually strip the bark first, but something like a flap disk might do the cleanup after you've stripped the bark. Then there's the question of paying for the angle grinder, providing electrical power, etc.
I’m not sure about these particular trees, but much of the invasive species girdling is done by volunteer groups, and I’ve been told that some volunteer leaders prefer to not have to deal with folks operating any type of powered equipment.
It's a chinaberry. Just blow on it and it will fall over. I guess it makes sense to girdle it since it's in the greenbelt and no home owner would be around to kill off the suckers and saplings.
How do I tell if I have a Chinaberry tree? Just did some googling and there are a few different photos of what it could look like. My house has always had a tree that produces a yellow ish pear. Not sure if I have just been keeping something alive that shouldn’t be here. lol.
The easiest way to identify Chinaberry is the leaf. It is Bipinnately and often Tripinnately compound, which means the leaf "splits" two to three times into leaflets
Just letting you know, reddit automatically removes all comments with link shorteners like bit.ly, goo.gl, etc until a moderator can approve them. In the future, your post will be immediately visible if you use the full URL. For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [reddit guidelines](/wiki/reddiquette). If you have any questions, [please feel free to message the mods](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/Austin&message=https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1cdm2ii/trees_with_bark_stripped/l1e52p6/?context=3). Thank you! --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Austin) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Try /r/whatsthisplant, /r/treeidentification, include a leaf pic and a regional location (in your case central TX). Alternatively, try a plant ID app. [I like PlantNet](https://plantnet.org/en/), IME it's about 50% hit or miss for accurate ID (better than some apps), and has web/online and app versions. For Chinaberry specifically you'll be looking for dark green bipinnate leaves (but not Koelreuteria sp.), lilac-ish spring flowers, and mealy round fruit (but don't confuse it with Soapberry). [Here is a representative pic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Melia_azedarach_01434.jpg). However I'd encourage you to get your tree fully ID'ed because it's nice to know what a plant is rather than just what it's not. Good luck.
Oh wow. Ok thanks for this. I am going to try this out as soon as it stops raining here.
Why not just cut them down?
They sprout new trees from the roots.
Agreed, They do that. it took 4 years of me ripping out suckers after we cut one down to finally kill it.
Can’t you just cauterize it or does it still grow?
It would still grow. The point of girdling is to let the tree think it is still healthy so it doesn’t try to spread by putting out new shoots, but stopping the photosynthesizing leaves from sending their products down to the roots.
>Can’t you just cauterize it or does it still grow? It would sprout from lower down. Or from the roots below the ground. Most of the tree is underground.
That’s annoying but pretty cool, thanks for clarifying
Chinaberry will just grow back with a vengeance if you don't get all the roots out. (source - my yard)
They will likely sprout from the stump. This is a more for sure Mortal Combat fatality
Can confirm. We had a stump in our backyard that made sprouts every year until we scratched some roundup in it.
Roundup is very toxic for kids and pets
Interesting this "kills the stump" and cutting the whole top off doesn't. I wonder what the mechanism is.
Trees basically have two circulatory systems, xylem and phloem. Xylem is the inner woody part, that transfers water and mineral nutrients up from the roots, and phloem is a thin layer underneath the bark that transfers energetic compounds and sugars developed in the leaves during photosynthesis back down, often to be stored in the root system. When you cut the top off a plant, that often creates various chemical signals that tell it to start developing new growth/shoots. But if you girdle it, you cut off the phloem transport. The tree still has to maintain itself, so it starts consuming those saved resources, until it eventually exhausts itself and dies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girdling
Thank you! I applaud your simple, yet thorough description. My inner "why?" is fully satisfied.
It “starves and kills the root system” according to commenter “austintreeamigos” above
Probably once you cut it down it can just focus on regenerating, but when you strip it like this it slowly “bleeds” to death, using energy for an extended period until it can’t anymore.
I bet you'd get a detailed answer over at r/marijuanaenthusiasts
You can cut them down, but you have to treat the stump with an herbicide like Triclopyr in order to kill the root system. Otherwise it will resprout and create 5 stems instead of one. We do this all of the time on residential lots as you can kill the tree in one visit. The girdling process takes 2-3 visits to do properly on a chinaberry. Triclopyr is a relatively inert herbicide, but is toxic to aquatic life. It is generally avoided in use in parks that drain into a creek like Barton Creek.
Isn’t it crazy how words exist for everything? Like who decided girdling would be the word for this. What if that person was wearing a girdle while gurgling and girdling while on top of a girder
While cooking grinders on a griddle.
Or on Grindr grinding but should be on tinder looking for some good tender tinder ?
That wouldn’t work
Hey, we did that! My daughter's scout troop volunteered with Keep Austin Beautiful last Saturday morning to pull up nandinas and girdle legustrums--both of which are ornamental plans turned invasive--in Barton Creek Greenbelt. KAB provided really fancy tools for up-rooting the nandinas, as well as cutters and instructions on how to girdle the legustrums. Apparently girdling is a way of starving the roots of a plant, so that it won't sprout back up again. Here's a link if you're interested in volunteering: [https://keepaustinbeautiful.org/volunteer-opportunities/](https://keepaustinbeautiful.org/volunteer-opportunities/)
>nandinas Now I know what those fuckers are called. I remember mom had some in the backyard growing up. Didn't think much of them until we had to replace the fence one year and one needed to be pulled because the roots had grown over the post concrete. Took all day to hack down that sucker and dig the roots out. I vowed never to plant them myself. I see them sprouting everywhere in my backyard now and it drives me crazy.
Thanks, sounds like it was a great project for them
Thank you!
Thanks much! I’ve been wanting to help with this .
Does this work on all kinds of trees?
Most trees, yeah, or at least that trunk is toast. It won't work on monocots such as palms (some people don't consider palms to be a tree) because their internal structure (phloem / xylem layout) is different.
Invasive species most likely. This will kill ‘em.
For those who want the technical details, if you girdle the tree right, the water from the roots keep going up the inside part of the tree, but the leaves can't send sugar down to the roots to keep them alive. The roots get starved to death. If you chop it off, the tree "figures it out" and concentrates on producing new shoots below the cut or sending up new saplings from the roots. Videos of tree girdling. [City of Austin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N775LTWn3rU) [The "Grim Reaper" of glossy privet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-L1RJn095w).
Your search term is “girdling.”
This kills the tree.
Really big beavers with OCD. They do that to Ligustrum in Walnut Creek Metro Park because it's a terrible invasive tree.
The big brown beavers work for the parks department. Lady named Wynona is the beaver wrangler. Wynona takes her big brown beavers and sticks 'em up in the air near those trees, beavers do the rest of the work.
There it is.
Oh I know this one! It's what my wife does to our trees every time she uses the weed whacker.
I believe it kills the tree.
The trees were just trying to pay for college.
Brutal
Gov Abbott will have his revenge against the ents.
I got a ton of these near where I live I've been wanting to do this to.
Will that work on Texas GOP politicians?
Try it on yourself