drought-killed trees

[Frederick W. Schueler]

Everyone,

Last August a lot of trees began to have dying leaves, and having given
the survivors time to recover, I've been going around documenting the
mortality.

An Apple tree across the street lost four of its six main trunks, which
we cut for firewood yesterday, but some of this dying-back may have been
before last summer, since the bark was loose or missing on a lot of it.

A Sugar Maple saplings near the Apple tree (20, 30, and 39mm DBH) lost
their leaves in August, and while the upper portions are dead no, they
all have some leafed-out branches lower down.

The Manitoba Maple "Negundo Grove" went quite brown and shed its leaves
in August and now all the trees have a lot of dead limbs, with the
largest tree and one that was a horizontal trunk alg the ground have bot
died.

Out on the "brushy shallow soil limestone oldfield" out back a lot of
the volunteer Scots Pine have very little foliage, and one is dead.

A 3.5m Balsam Fir is completely dead.

A clump of 2m White Cedar along the path is dead, though there's a live
tree growing up through the clump, and scattered small trees along the path.

A lot of herbal plants show reduced extent, so I'll be doing some
snooping around about those as well.

fred.
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---------Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad ------------
Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
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[Matt Keevil]

We lost a lot of small spruce trees and one large one. We had cedar tree harvesters lose/abandon a bunch of of 1.5-3m cedars they dug I think three years ago that I replanted in various places. Most of these died. Although I would have thought them to have been fairly safe after that amount of time, they clearly were not. One natural patch of cedars on what must have been particularly shallow soil has died and a ca. 15 cm diameter breast height cedar has died along with adjacent aspen saplings/polls.

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[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 6/10/2026 5:19 PM, Frederick W. Schueler wrote:

> Last August a lot of trees began to have dying leaves, and I've been going around documenting the mortality.

* some results from the past couple of days - these are remote, so I
can't be sure they were alive before the drought:

* lots of dead Tamaracks in the Long Swamp Fen, north of Manhard.

* many dead Scots Pine along River Road north of Gideon Adams Park.

* many dead Conifers south of County Road 20 W of Oxford Station - some
of these look like they had been previously, and the freshly dead ones
seem to have been mostly Tamaracks.

We have some English Walnuts behind out houses, which have in previous
cold winters died back to the level of the snow when the temperature got
down to -30°C. In previous mild winters they had sprouted up to 4m
height, and while we didn't record any -30°C in last winter's cold, they
seem to have died completely. I haven't checked to see if there are some
little sprouts, but it looks like they're completely dead now, perhaps
weakened by the drought and then finished off by the winter cold.