Our 65 gallon Water Oak, purchased from Brazos Bend Tree Farm, was planted in November 2014. It looked good with a nice full canopy.
It leafed out very early (late Feb / early March) in 2015 and was immediately infected with a disfiguring fungus called "oak leaf blister". This fungus produces large cupped depressions on the new leaves - these pale green depressions eventually turn brown. My Water Oak had so incredibly many of these deformities that it probably lost 90% of its leaves by summer - they didn't grow back all year. In February 2016 I was ready to tackle this issue preemptively - as the buds were about to break I sprayed the entire tree thoroughly with Daconil fungicide. Bud-break was on February 26th and the oak-leaf-blister was almost completely absent - a rare success in the battle against the brutal environment in my yard! However, just as the tree was freshly leafed out, then came the second round of attack - the june-bugs erupted one evening in early March in a tremendous swarm. I remember driving back from an evening out and as I approached my subdivision, june-bugs were hitting the wind-shield. I exited the car at my house and felt swarms of june-bugs buzzing frantically around my head. I immediately thought "Must save the Water-Oak!" I rushed out into the yard with a flash-light to inspect the Water-Oak (the only tree that had leafed out substantially at this point). It was smothered from head to toe in june-bugs which were munching away voraciously. So I sprayed the entire tree with imidacloprid which seemed to stop them dead in their tracks. Over the next weeks the ground underneath the Water Oak (and Swamp Chestnut Oak) was so covered in dead june-bugs that it looked like I had june-bug mulch! Since then the tree has been looking pretty good - not much vertical growth, but a lot better than the summer of 2015. It produced a crop of acorns in 2016 - the picture below is from September 17th 2016. The Water Oak leafed out early again in 2017. I sprayed with Daconil fungicide just before bud-break, and on March 11th it was doing very well without any sign of the oak-leaf-blister fungus despite the constant damp weather. Many catkins were present near the top of the tree.
The Water Oak continued to do well through 2018 and 2019.
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Water Oak (early July 2021)
Water Oak (early July 2020)
Water Oak (end of June 2019)
Water Oak (July 2018)
Water Oak (July 2017)
Water Oak (July 2016)
Water Oak (summer 2015)
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