Transplanting trees is a great way to save money in your garden and landscaping. At times trees have a tendency to grow in an unwanted area and transplanting them allows them to be in an area where they can truly be appreciated.
The flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, is a small deciduous tree that has simple oval shaped leaves. In the spring this tree is covered in gorgeous creamy white flowers and in the fall the leaves turn into bright red fall foliage. The flowering dogwood is native to East Texas and produces green berry like fruit that turns red when the fruit is mature. This fruit provides birds with food.
In the past few years in East Texas we have battled some serious droughts and have unfortunately lost several trees and one of these trees that have succumbed to the drought is the dogwood. We personally have lost 3 dogwood trees on our farm.
When we added our new pond at the end of last summer we moved a fence closer toward the house so that we could have a larger pasture area around the pond. While moving the fence I noticed a small dogwood tree growing too close to the new fence. The best time to transplant a tree would be in winter when the tree is dormant and have a better chance at survival, but since I had to finish the fence I ended up having to take the risk and transplant the tree in the fall.
Here is the dogwood tree in its original location. The leaves are beginning to turn red.
I dug up the tree leaving as much of the roots as possible intact which was not too hard since it was quite a tiny tree. I dug a hole in a new location near a spring fed creek.
After planting the dogwood, I made a ring of dirt around the tree and gave it a long thorough cool drink from the creek. See the bucket in the picture next to the tree? I dipped that bucket on a daily basis for the first couple of weeks in the creek to water the newly transplanted tree.
Here is the dogwood today. It has new leaves budding out which is a great sign that it survived being transplanted!
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