My beautiful Japanese maple in front of my house has a disease or something. I’m worried about it. This one main branch and all the smaller branches that shoot off of it are dying. It started with some leaves turning red about a month ago, and now they’ve shriveled up. Some of the smaller twigs turned black, but the thicker part of the branch is still green. I’m going to post on GardenWeb to see what kind of answers I can get.
The rest of the tree looks just fine, as shown in this photo. What should I do? Should I cut off that branch as far down the tree as I can go? How will I know the disease or pest hasn’t started attacking other parts of the tree? Is there a pesticide that could help inoculate the rest of the tree against whatever is harming this branch?
More of this tree has died back now (2009), and Larry Sagers confirmed for me that it is verticillium after I cut off a branch cross section and showed it to him.
There was only one comment on the GW post, and she thought it looked like verticillium wilt. Bad news. I cut the branch off as low as I could go, and I can just treat the tree as well as possible and hope more doesn’t get infected.