Specimen Trees have been growing and supplying trees to the industry for over 50 years and being nurserymen, they have seen underlying causes of both success and failure.

Tips and techniques have been passed on to designers and contractors over the years and the datasheets you can find here are valuable guides on avoiding costly mistakes.

Where specific site details are needed, eg planting over contaminated ground, please use the contact page and we will provide you with as much information as we can.

DRAINAGE
All trees should be planted with the knowledge that irrigation and groundwater will be able to drain away successfully.

If in doubt, a simple soakage test will prove the issue.

All large scale construction sites will require positive drainage to be fitted to the tree pits.

This is a consequence of modern construction equipment leaving ground conditions highly compacted, with poor structure and impeded drainage.

Track laying machines remove 30% of available soil oxygen at a single pass and coupled with this, an increase in anaerobic gases and reduced nutrition.

Further tracking of the ground and machine handling wet soil creates perched water tables which invariably flood into the lowest point on site which will be your tree pits.

IRRIGATION
Often overlooked, but newly transplanted trees rather inconveniently deflect any rainfall away from the rootball once they are in leaf. If ignored, a critical point arrives quite quickly as the limited moisture supply in the rootball is used up and shrinkage occurs leaving an air gap around the rootball. At this point, watering the surrounding ground is irrelevant.

A regulated supply of water to the tree is essential and can be simply installed with a metered supply. This type of equipment has improved hugely over the old leaky pipe systems that just emptied themselves at the lowest point. Now pressure regulated drippers are available and cheap to install.

In the first summer newly planted trees are dependent on artificial watering, particularly container grown trees, which are often grown in free draining composts and have come off an automated 24hr watering regime.

Relatively large volumes of water are needed and hence irrigation and drainage go hand in hand.

You may download our Information Sheets from the following links freely.

BACKFILL
CROWDED
PLANTING DEPTH
DRAINAGE
GUYING
IRRIGATION
TREES NEAR BUILDINGS
ROOT BARRIERS
SURFACES

The information contained here is a guide to help you to specify your projects.

Please read in conjunction with advice and consultation with Specimen Trees. No warranty or guarantee is implied, or given.

Please contact us before starting work on any project.