Ep 250 - Weeping Cherry Dilemmas: Trees Tell a Story

A weeping cherry tree begins to “bleed,” revealing what lies beneath—from soil stress to planting missteps. Plus, seed-starting tips and a reflection on where we’re truly meant to grow. 

In this episode, I share what gummosis can tell us about tree health and planting practices, and why repeated plant failure in the same spot deserves a closer look. 

We also revisit how weeping cherry trees are grafted, what reversion means, and how to care for them thoughtfully.

Along the way, I share a few clever seed-planting techniques from listeners and a small correction from last week’s episode—because the garden is always teaching.

Link to the Companion Blog Post: When a Weeping Cherry “Bleeds”: What Lies Beneath

🔗 Links to Related Posts and Podcasts: 

• Ep 247 - Nothing Is Wasted: Leaf Mold, Mulch & Letting Go 
• Ep 249 - Living Mulch: Layering with Native Plants 
• Reverting Weeping Cherry - Blog Post 
  
  
• How to make DIY Seed Tape
  
  

Garden Dilemmas? Visit: https://askmarystone.com

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I'd love to hear your garden and nature stories, as well as your thoughts on topics for future podcast episodes. You can email me at AskMaryStone@gmail.com.   

You can follow Garden Dilemmas on Facebook and Instagram #MaryElaineStone.

You can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your favorite podcast app.

Thank you for sharing the Garden of Life,
 Mary Stone
Columnist & Garden Designer

More about the Podcast and Column:

 Welcome to Garden Dilemmas, Delights, and Discoveries.

 It's not only about gardens; it's about nature's inspirations, about grasping the glories of the world around us, gathering what we learned from Mother Nature, and carrying these lessons into our garden of life. So, let's jump in, in the spirit of learning from each other. We have lots to talk about.

Thanks for tuning in, Mary Stone 
Garden Dilemmas? AskMaryStone.com
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Transcript

 Ep-250. Weeping Cherry Dilemmas: Trees Tell a Story

Sat, Apr 25, 2026 8:57PM • 12:41

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Weeping cherry, grafting, mulch volcano, root girdling, soil compaction, fungal canker, copper fungicide, seed tapes, vegetable seeds, planting techniques, tree health, pruning, natural weeping cherry, garden dilemmas, garden care.

SPEAKERS

Mary Stone

Mary Stone  00:00

Mary, Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. I'm Mary stone, and welcome to garden dilemmas, delights, and discoveries. It's not only about gardens, it's about nature's inspirations, about grasping the glories of the world around us, gathering what we learn from Mother Nature, and carrying these lessons into our garden of life. So let's jump in, in the spirit of learning from each other, we have lots to talk about.

Mary Stone  00:26

Hello, there. It's Mary stone on the screen porch. Indeed, the weather has shifted from 92 degrees last week to below-freezing mornings this week. It happened for two mornings, and I had several of you send photos of your garden ghosts, you know, putting sheets atop your plants so that they don't freeze their little faces. My friend and client, Tara, sent me photos of her Peony covered up, and everything worked out just fine. The buds were not damaged. 

Mary Stone  00:54

I want to thank those who reached back after our last week's episode, living mulch layering with native plants. As a result, I have a small correction on the type of anemone that graces my woodland floor that the Bumblebee was scurrying on. It's a rue anemone, not a woodland anemone. The identifying feature is it has pointed petals instead of rounded ones. So there you go. And isn't that just like the garden and life? We feel certain about identifying things, and then, with a closer look, we learn again. May we never stop being open to learning again. 

Mary Stone  01:30

I also got my beet and carrot seeds planted. I heard from a few of you about techniques for planting tiny vegetable seeds using a toothpick. When you dampen it, the tiny little seed sticks to it. It's the most cute little clever thing. It made me laugh doing it. And then you can easily poke them into the soil. Or if you're starting your seeds indoors, you can poke them into the starting mix. So clever and wooden skewers that you use for shish kebabs works as well. 

Mary Stone  01:59

Another technique I had heard from you, and I never heard of these things. I cannot believe it, but there are vegetable seed tapes that decompose. There are ready-made ones that you can just buy. They're a little pricey, though, and there's a limited variety on the kinds of seeds. And there's a DIY approach using toilet paper, using the kind you would use here when you have septic systems so that it decomposes easily. You cut it an inch to two inches wide, use a paintbrush and do a flower water mix, you know, at a glue-like consistency, drop little dots of the glue at the spacing suggested on the seed pack, and then use your toothpick technique. Stick the toothpick and water, and then grab a seed and place it right on your teepee, on your toilet paper, add another layer, and voila, you have your very own Do It Yourself. Seed tape. I'll put a link in the show notes of how to do it, more specifically, one that I found, but I look forward to trying that next time. 

Mary Stone  02:58

I can't wait to see what sprouts in the garden. I keep going up there to look for the newly Sprouted Seeds. And I think that cold spells are delaying things a little bit, but soon things will grow. Speaking of sprouting, I couldn't believe what was emerging from a weeping cherry tree, which led to this week's story. And it starts like this.

Mary Stone  03:20

Hello, fellow lovers of all things green. While visiting a long-time client in Piscataway, I came upon a brown, syrupy wound oozing halfway up the trunk of a weeping cherry tree, just below the graft. It hadn't been there last year. Weeping cherry trees are often top grafted the weeping portion, the Scion is grafted onto a straight trunk the root stock, creating the graceful umbrella-like form the commonly sold weeping Higgin flowering cherry Prunus sebutella pendula, is actually a combination of Hardy Sargent cherry roots, a Yoshino cherry trunk, and a Higan cherry canopy. The graft is typically just below the crown where the tree's branching begins. We planted the weeping cherry to replace another that failed in the same spot, likely because it wasn't planted correctly. You've seen it, and I've seen it way too often, the all too common mulch volcano, not only unsightly, but it's also harmful. Excess mulch piled against the trunk holds moisture, inviting rot, insects, and disease, and sometimes what appears to be a mulch volcano is actually a tree planted too shallowly. And that is a pet peeve of mine. I've seen it way too often, and sadly, even professionals plant this way. I think sometimes they think it's the right way, because you see it so commonly. Root girdling often follows as roots circle the trunk and constrict it, cutting off water and nutrients. It's like wearing something. Too tight. Everything gets restricted. You know, those too-tight pair of jeans.

Mary Stone  05:06

Roots wrap inward rather than outward, slowly suffocating the plant. When planting, give your tree, shrub or perennial the right start. Dig a hole two to three times the width of the root ball, but no deeper. Amend with organic matter, compacting the soil slightly to remove air pockets and avoid fertilizing it at planting as it increases stress. Once your plant is in the ground, apply two to three inches of natural hardwood mulch or leaf mold, you know is my favorite, keeping it away from the trunk. The oozing sap I noticed is called gamosis, a tree's distress signal. 

Mary Stone  05:45

Trees don't bleed without reason. Often the cause is a canker, bacterial, or fungal that enters through a wound from a pruning cut, winter injury, or even a nick from a string trimmer. Pathogens are opportunists, after all, waiting for an opening. Now here's where the story takes a turn. Recall how we spoke about newly planted plants tend to sleep the first year, creep the second, then leap the third. Well, we installed the tree three years ago, and last year it began to leap so beautifully. It was stunning. But this spring, the leaves are coming in very sparse, and again, the tree is bleeding. That detail feels important. 

Mary Stone  06:31

When two trees falter in the same spot, it's rarely a coincidence. It suggests something lingering below the surface, perhaps compacted soil, poor drainage, or roots impeded by a shale shelf or a persistent soil issue. I'm going to bounce back to the protocols on planting. One of the mistakes folks make is they compact the soil too tightly around the newly planted tree or shrub. You don't want to compact the soil so much that it inhibits air circulation and water penetration. 

Mary Stone  07:04

In this case, the bleeding is limited to a side branch, which is reassuring, because it's not by some other mechanical problem. I sent photos to my go-to arborist, Dave Dubie. He believes that by fertilizing and applying a copper-based fungicide along the trunk, the tree will recover. So I'm hoping that is the case. If the bleeding is coming from a branch, you can prune the effective branch back to healthy wood, clean your tools thoroughly, and dispose of the debris in the trash, not the compost, because you don't want to spread disease. Then support the tree with proper watering and careful mulching to reduce stress. 

Mary Stone  07:46

But sometimes what we see above ground is only a symptom of something unresolved beneath in the garden, as in life, when something falters more than once, it's worth pausing, looking a little deeper and asking not just what is happening, but why here the tree, after all, is telling a story, and perhaps it's also telling us this may not be the right place for it to thrive.

Mary Stone  08:13

I'm reminded of a weeping cherry that began to revert, sending up straight, vigorous branches from below its graft. At the time, I wrote about how we can carefully prune the reverted branches back into harmony with the tree's grafted weeping form, but I couldn't help but feel empathy for the tree wishing to return to the origin of its roots. Perhaps something we all wish to do. Garden dilemmas? Ask Mary Stone.com

Mary Stone  08:41

And when I'm speaking of returning to the origin of our roots, I mean not our roots of ethnicity, but our roots of kindness and generosity and acceptance that we all have within I think it's hard to really center ourselves on those qualities as we maneuver through some of these crazy things going on in our world, but if more of us do, we will shift things, and that is for sure. 

Mary Stone  09:08

Speaking of roots, we have a little more time, and I figured, let us jump back to learning how to help your weeping cherry with reverted branches. Before pruning a weeping cherry, we need to confirm if it's a natural or a grafted tree, by looking for the graft knot on the trunk, if it doesn't have a graft, which is typically about a foot below the canopy of the tree where the branches start, then you have a naturally grown cherry tree. I had never heard of such a thing.

Mary Stone  09:36

 I was talking to Ben Jansen of Jansen Nursery in Florida and New York, and he suggested I reach out to J. Frank Schmidt and Sons in boring Oregon. They are wholesale growers, well known for introducing new plants. And from them, I can learn how naturally grown weeping cherry trees come to be, and this lovely gal, Nancy Buley, their communications director, who gave me a crash course. She explained that weeping trees weep because they don't have apical dominance, which makes plants stand upright. They'd scramble on the ground if they weren't trained to grow upright before weeping. She explained that a natural weeping cherry, which is Prunus pendula, rather than the grafted, grows on its natural its own root, rather than the root stock of another cherry tree. We unnaturally get it to stand alone by staking it at whatever height we wish it to weep, Nancy said. And that was a funny moment, because we both were laughing. Isn't it ironic that we're calling it natural when we're actually training it to stand upright? There's something very odd about that, or a little ironic, don't you think? 

Mary Stone  10:46

Naturally grown weeping cherry will not revert; the upward-growing branches will eventually arch down. So if you prune them off, the tree will lose its weeping shape. So let them be. And that is why it's important to identify what kind of weeping cherry tree you have, regarding the canopy length, no big haircuts, please. Short haircuts on weeping cherry trees by humans or deer look like pink umbrellas, not so attractive. Cut branches, ideally no more than six inches off the ground as severely shortening them may weaken the graft part and encourage the root stock to dominate. 

Mary Stone  11:27

And as I said before, we can't blame the tree. There's something comforting about returning to our roots, and maybe that's the tree's reminder to us that growth isn't about forcing what doesn't come naturally, but about finding where we are meant to be and healing and growing from there. 

Mary Stone  11:45

So thank you for joining me on this lovely day here on the screen porch. I'm heading off to visit a client to do some garden tune-up. I always look forward to this time of year for seeing long-time customers and seeing their gardens grow just as we grow in our lives, so enjoy your day. Keep your hair neat and tidy. No extreme haircuts, please. I'm being silly. See you next time on the screen porch. 

Mary Stone  12:10

You can follow Garden Dilemmas on Facebook or online at GardenDilemmas.com and on Instagram at hashtag. Mary Elaine stone, garden dilemmas, delights, and discoveries, as produced by Alex Bartling, thanks for coming by. I look forward to chatting again from my screen porch, and always remember to embrace the unexpected in this garden of life. Have a great day.