Poplar/aspen?

[PierreR]

Hey, has anyone tried to ground layer one from the sucker? I dug around a couple to see what the deal was, the seem all connected like a big web... I figured I would give it a whirl, they grow like weeds around here and looking at the roots, I cant see them surviving if I just cut it free and hoped for the best. If it roots great, if not and it dies, I would have killed it anyway...
I also have some of the tall column poplar in my yard, and also have a bunch of the little buggers popping through my lawn.

 

[PierreR]

Up date. SO I tried ground layering a couple. One I did a rough prune, cut about 30% of the foilage mass, and ground layered. The other was a little larger, just straight ground layer. Both are showing new root buds. 4-6 weeks of decent weather left, hopfully they make it through winter, will check back in late fall, with plans to harvest in the spring.

Interestingly enough, neither has dropped a leafe, nor turned any yellow. There is a barely noticeable color difference between the layered trees, and their neighbours. Slightly less green, but I'm happy so far.

Will layer a couple others in the spring, and see how they do.

 

[aml1014]

I have some cottonwood, and they are not turning out to be very well suited for life in a pot.

I also have a cottonwood and it does awsome in a pot just don't leave it on the ground or you'll have a landscape tree in no time at all

 

[Leo in N E Illinois]

Crust - fantastic trunk, hope it continues to do well for you.

Aspen spread by stolons or root suckers. Some individual clones are known to cover more than 1/4 mile with suckers. The colony can live for centuries, as long or longer than bristlecone pine. I believe the record is more than 5 thousand years old, meaning the colony came from a single seed some 5 thousand years or more ago. No part of the colony has living wood that old, the new suckers replace the older suckers. Interestingly, the really old colonies stop producing fertile seed somewhere near 1000 years old. After that vegetative reproduction is all they can do. Something about shortening telomeres with age making meiosis for seed production impossible, I wish I had saved a link to the original article, it was fascinating.

Also from the same source read that aspen can share mycorrhiza with other species, including Ponderosa pine. In the experiment, radioactive tagged sugar was injected into the trunk of a Ponderosa pine about 6 feet above ground level. In a remarkably short period of time, if I remember right, less than an hour, the tagged sugar was showing up in an aspen a fair distance away from the pine, moved there by the mycorrhiza. Hypothesis is that the mycorrhiza allow the trees to share water and nutrient resources. Wild stuff. Lots of implications.