Western Red Cedar: Fast Facts + How to Plant

Izzy Christmann from Davey's Portland, Oregon, office talks about the western red cedar tree, including essential planting tips, the variety of sizes it can grow into and how it interacts with weather conditions in the Pacific Northwest.

In this episode we cover:  

• Western red cedar fast facts (:42-2:02)
• Current weather in Portland, OR (2:42)
• What to do with trees under stress (3:52) 
• Deep root watering best practices (4:41)
• Seasonal weather patterns in the Pacific Northwest (5:46)
• Western red cedar sizes (6:42)
• Mulching trees in the Pacific Northwest (7:42)
• Fertilizing western red cedars (8:33)
• Planting schedule in Oregon (9:18) 
• What size of western red cedars to plant (10:33) (12:15)
• Western red cedar pests (13:47)
• Izzy's journey to the green industry and Davey (14:48) (15:06)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more watering and mulching tips, read our blogs, What is Slow Watering of a Tree? and The Proper Way To Mulch Your Trees.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

Transcript

[music]

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. I'm joined this week by Izzy Christmann. She's a sales arborist for the Davey Tree Expert Company in Portland, Oregon. Today, we're doing another one of our series on specific species. Today, it's the western red cedar. Welcome to the show, Izzy. How are you?

Izzy Christmann: I'm good. How are you?

Doug: All right. You need to school me on everything I need to know about the western red cedar tree. First off, how big does it get?

Izzy: They can get pretty big. I've seen some old-growth ones in forests out here. They can get up to 5 or 6 feet across in diameter, some even bigger. They can also get heart rot and have the whole middle of the trunk hollow to where you can walk through them, but they're still alive and thriving.

Doug: Wow. Sounds like a very cool tree. How far east does it come? Do you know?

Izzy: Most of the western red cedar, I think we are talking the west side of the Cascade Range.

Doug: Is this tree used all over the area where you're at?

Izzy: It is. Technically, it is a false cedar. It is also what we call arborvitae, the common tree that's used as a hedge, but in its natural habitat, it is a huge evergreen.

Doug: Are they planted in people's houses, or does it get too big to be in their yard?

Izzy: They can be. I recently was on a walk in my neighborhood, and they're all over in this urban area, but they're also in the forested areas among your fir trees and your hemlocks and understory shrubs.

Doug: Is the tree prone to any diseases?

Izzy: It is fairly resistant to insects and diseases. It mainly deals with heart rot and some root rots. Then the insects only become a problem when the tree is under stress, mainly from drought. The insects are more of a secondary problem for this one.

Doug: When they get that heart rot, that must be a cool thing to be able to walk underneath the tree. You say that it's okay, the tree is fine when it has that?

Izzy: Yes. The way that this species is able to compartmentalize the spread of that decay, it is still able to stay alive.

Doug: In the Portland area, what is your weather been like in the last couple seasons for that tree? Has it been wet, dry, or what are you looking at?

Izzy: The tree itself is a very shade-tolerant tree. It really likes moist soil. In 2021, the PNW had this heat dome event. That was the start of this trickle-down effect of a lot of our mature evergreens seeing drought stress. The western red cedar is one, in my day-to-day, that it's the most prominent. We're seeing a lot of thinning of the foliage, especially from the top down. A lot of resources have created a transparency chart to show low transparency is basically the canopy is nice and full and thick, you can't see through it. Then you start getting into the moderate, which is it's thinning, you can tell that the tree is stressed out. Then high transparency is you're getting that top-down dieback, and you can really see branches dying. It's looking stressed out.

Doug: When you have a tree that is under that kind of stress, what can you do for it? I'm talking about one of the giant ones. Can you do anything for it?

Izzy: When they're in these urban areas, I have been encouraging homeowners to do deep root waterings. Out here in Portland specific, we have a lot of surface shrubs, rhododendrons, azaleas. Those will suck up a lot of the water in that top one to two inches of soil. A lot of times, we have very clay soil out here. That water doesn't get down quite deep enough for those large mature trees to uptake it. Deep root watering and fertilization just to keep the roots healthy and boost it overall because they're really struggling with our hotter, longer summers.

Doug: Let's talk about that watering. We're just taking the hose out there and letting it soak? Is that the idea?

Izzy: You can. That's a method that works. I have been referring people to a lot of deep-root watering probes. It looks almost like a pogo stick that you poke into the ground. You attach it to your hose. You can set it on a slow trickle and just leave it in the ground. You can also just poke it around the drip line of the tree and get some water into there, and do it two to three times a week in the summertime, especially when it's hot. I'll tell homeowners, some people they don't want to spend as much money on water. They try and keep that water bill low.

I tell them anything is better than nothing during the summer because out here, a common thought that I get from homeowners are, "We live in the PNW where it rains six months out of the year. Why do I need to water my large mature trees?" Our hardiness zone is changing. That's something we have to explain to them and educate them on.

Doug: From the eastern part of the US, I think of Portland as rainy and cool and the ideal climate for trees. Is that a fantasy from this side? What is it really like?

Izzy: It's definitely like that. I think we really experience the seasons out here. This winter has been much more mild, but it seems to be every other winter, we're getting much heavier rain and a couple of ice storms. Then, some winters like this one, we had one little light snow dusting, but for the most part, it's been pretty mild.

Doug: An ice storm for trees can't be a good thing, right?

Izzy: No, because they'll come through, and it will freeze over on the branches and make them super susceptible to then breaking when the wind comes through, and things just continually refreeze. It can be very damaging to foliage and tree branches.

Doug: I want to go back to watering. Are you seeing every different size tree of a western red cedar in people's landscapes?

Izzy: Yes. Again, from arborvitae to a large mature one that's in somebody's front yard. The arborvitae definitely wouldn't be my first recommendation for a hedge just because typically these are in the direct sun. Again, this species is very shade-tolerant and drought-intolerant. It does not want that direct sunlight. We often get customers who have a hedge with two of the arborvitae have died out in the middle of it, and it's a seven-foot tall hedge, and you're looking at having to replace a pretty large section of that. Then you get your large mature tree that was probably there decades before the house was built. There's quite a range but they all need water. They all should be getting water.

Doug: Until we get our tree watered, how about mulching? Is that going to be something that's going to be a positive in your climate?

Izzy: Yes, mulching out here. A lot of the soil, again, it's clay. Bringing any type of organic matter and material back into the soil is always going to benefit the tree as long as we're not volcano mulching and building that up over the trunk of the tree.

Doug: We're not allowed to say the word volcano mulching ever again because we talk about it every other podcast.

Izzy: Yes, it's very common amongst homeowners.

Doug: I talk about it every time I talk about trees anywhere, out to a garden club or to regular people. That volcano mulching is the bane of the existence of arborists, that's for sure, right?

Izzy: Yes.

Doug: Let's talk about fertilization for these trees, too, using the same sort of thing, a probe, and getting that liquid fertilizer down in there.

Izzy: Yes, that's what I would recommend because that's, again, in those 8 to 12 inches below the soil is where all those absorptive roots are that are going to uptake your water and nutrients that you're injecting into there. Out here, if a homeowner is wanting to do it themselves, you can use a topical fertilizer because we do get enough moisture out here in the fall that can leach down into the soil. For the most part, getting it a deep root injection is just the best way to go.

Doug: Tell me a little bit about your planting schedule and your climate. When do you start planting, or have you started planting?

Izzy: Yes. Typically, we plant in the spring and the fall, depending on any projects or demand. Spring, I would say, seems to be the most popular. Early spring, let the tree get established throughout the rainy season, and then be good to go come summertime, but still consistently watering it to make sure it survives.

Doug: With that clay soil, what are you doing when you plant? Are you using just the native soil, or do you have to do some improvements when you plant that type of tree, or Western red cedar.

Izzy: There definitely are some soil amendments that happen a lot of times, depending on the size that somebody is purchasing. A 21-gallon pot is relatively big and has a lot of soil in it. Sometimes we will haul away the soil that comes from the actual hole and use what was in the pot. There have been larger planting projects where we buy a couple cubic feet of soil at the local chip drop and use that. It really just varies from property to property.

Doug: When you find the right place for this tree, what size do you recommend for the homeowner? Is there a certain size, or it depends on what they want?

Izzy: I would say it depends on what they want. There's definitely a whole variety of cedar trees that you could get that might be a little bit more tolerant to our climate than this one, particularly, and one that would fit an urban landscape a little bit better. Again, the arborvitae is the most traditional one that we see, but there's plenty of weeping cedars and smaller ornamentals that might be more fitting.

Doug: If you had your druthers, would it be a bigger tree or a smaller tree that you plant?

Izzy: Depending on if you have a property where you have the space for a large tree. Large trees are great. They provide so much shade, and they're beautiful. A lot of times we see these huge trees in our area planted within 10 feet of a house, and that is just encroaching a little bit on just your safety, potentially, and foundations of houses.

Doug: Doesn't it drive you nuts when you drive by new construction and they're putting something like a red cedar that's going to get giant about five feet from the house? It looks great that day because it's five foot tall. Then, in five years, people are calling Davey, and the chainsaws have to come out?

Izzy: Right. Luckily, the Western red cedar isn't one that people typically buy as a Christmas tree because we get lots of those that have been planted next to a house. 10 years later, they've got a giant tree within two feet of their home.

Doug: When I'm choosing a tree to plant in my landscape and I've got the right variety, do I want a younger, smaller, or littler tree, or do I want a bigger tree? How do you like to decide which one gets planted there?

Izzy: I usually will do an entire property walkthrough with a homeowner and try and get an idea of their landscaping goals. If they want something that's bigger and they want to get a yard more shade, or if they want something more ornamental and are looking for something aesthetically pleasing with flowers or pretty branch structure, that seems to be very important. A lot of people, I find, they end up going the route of they want something that's smaller and more ornamental versus large.

Doug: When I pick the right tree, do I want one that's just in a pot or a big one in balled-and-burlap? How do you prefer to plant?

Izzy: We have the proper tools, so balled-and-burlap is no problem for us. A lot of times, if homeowners do their own plantings, they get left in the balled-and-burlap. That ultimately causes the tree mortality because the roots can't establish. Yes, a lot of times, too, we will get different prices from a nursery, and whether it's balled-and-burlap or potted can be a price difference. That has a factor.

Doug: When you get situations that put a Western red cedar in distress, are there any pests that will attack it when it's struggling?

Izzy: You'll definitely get your common wood-boring insects, for the most part, is what I've seen. Other than that, it's nothing specific, but for the main part, it's boring beetles. Yes.

Doug: How old do those big ones get? Are we talking 100 years old or 100 years old? Wow.

Izzy: Yes, 100 plus. Yes.

Doug: Do you have big stands of them?

Izzy: There can be. Yes. A lot of times, I've seen a lot in my neighborhood where there's three or four together. Again, they're mixed in with a lot of evergreen forests. People like us we can tell the difference between a fir and a cedar and a hemlock, but to just an ordinary eye, it might look all the same. They all blend together.

Doug: Izzy, how did you get into this?

Izzy: I majored in forestry and natural resources in college. I was unsure about it at first, but I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and they had a really good program and really good curriculum, so I stuck with it.

Doug: Then, moving into Davey, tell me a little bit about what you get out of your job and why it's right for you.

Izzy: Yes. I have been with the Portland office since 2020. I interned at this office when I was still in college between junior and senior year, and then I came back to work full-time. Yes, I've been in the field. I've been the sales service coordinator, and now I've made my way into the sales arborist position, which I really love because I do have an educational background in it. I have field experience, and I love talking to people and getting to know them.

I feel like I am always able to bridge the gap between this arboriculture world that they don't necessarily know a lot about, or they've Googled here and there, but I'm able to make things a lot more understandable to them, and just get to meet some cool people.

Doug: All right, Izzy. Great stuff. I'm going to leave it right there. Thanks very much for your time and educating us about the Western red cedar. Very much appreciated, and I'm sure we'll talk to you again soon.

Izzy: All right. Thank you for having me.

Doug: All right, tree lovers. I want you to tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster. I need you to do me a favor. Subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss a show. Are you planting anything special this spring? I'd love to know what and why. There's a couple of ways to let me know. You can send us an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S@D-A-V-E-Y.com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your ideas could be on a future show. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

[music]

[00:17:04] [END OF AUDIO]