Take It From the Expert

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Dec 3, 1998

If you're a home gardener, I'm sure you've tackled transplanting before. I'm not just talking bedding plants here. My recent ordeal involved trying to transplant a 20-foot Leylandii cypress. I say "try" because that is precisely what I did.

Transplanting for most established plants is always an iffy proposition. If a plant is more than a few years old, your odds will always go down. Ah, but I'm a garden writer, an expert. Surely my odds are better because I know what to do.

Well, my problems started quickly. The cypress was 20-feet long, but I soon found out that 15 feet of those were underground. To make things even tougher, the area where this cypress was growing consisted of two inches of mulch that covered two inches of topsoil -- that covered 50 feet of adobe-hard clay. After an hour of digging, I was less than 12 inches down!

I think you know what direction this is going. Shoot, if I hadn't been struggling for an hour, I would have seen the handwriting on the wall, too. I applied a little bit of extra leverage on the shovel and nothing happened. I applied a little bit more extra leverage on the shovel and nothing happened. I jumped up and down on the handle of the shovel and something happened. The root snapped. The shovel broke. Four cubic feet of dirt shot straight into the air. Three cubic feet of dirt came down and landed in my hair. The other cubic foot landed in my right eye!

So now I have a broken shovel. Dirt in my hair. Mud in my eye. And a soon-to-be dead cypress. Ah, the adventures of transplanting. Don't let this happen to you.

If you do need to transplant, try to do so when the specimen is still young and has youthful roots. Do so in the dormant season, which is this time of year (at least I did something right). Start digging well away from the trunk and go straight down, trying to get as much of the rootball as possible. After transplanting, water using a preventive shock treatment such as vitamin B1.

Of course, now you know all of this is much easier written than done. Take it from the expert.

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