My Beautiful Italian Cypress Was Butchered By A Tree Service

Q. HELP! My 25 year old beautiful Italian Cypress have been butchered by a tree service hired only to top them. How can I save these once beautiful trees. I am sick. I have been hosing them down every morning and deep watering them also.They have many brown areas that have been chopped to the limbs. There is a lot of green but, they do not look well. I can take a picture and send it if it will help garner some advice.

Overwatering or overfertilizing or both
can cause excessive growth and "floppiness"

A. You can send me a picture but frequent water may in fact be hurting the tree. Go back to deeper (12 to 18 inches deep) watering occasionally. Right now perhaps not any more often than once a week at the most.

            You can also try to apply some fertilizer lightly, one application only. It does you no good to fertilize over and over. It will put on new growth mostly now and slow down as the summer is concluding.

            If the landscape company has cut back the stems into bare wood it is very possible it may not recover. If it does recover because they did not cut too deeply the recovery will be slow. Unfortunately this is a problem when they prune with hedge shears which is ridiculous. 

            Frequent watering may cause some succulent growth to occur which will not be sturdy and this growth will be “floppy”.

            I wish I had better news but you will have to wait and see how the plant responds. But in the meantime water and fertilize normally; water once a week and fertilize once or maybe twice this season. That’s all you can do. Let me know how it turns out.