# Wound dressing



## treeguy347 (Nov 11, 2002)

I have seen many different kinds of wound dressings for after pruning. I do mainly removals, and am starting to do a little more trimming/pruning. Do these products work well, or is it better to let the tree heal itself? Spray-on vs. brush-on? Any info appreciated. I ask this because I had a customer insist on me doing his pruning and insisted on the spray-on stuff.


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## rbtree (Nov 11, 2002)

One, trees don't heal, they seal...

Two, wound dressings have not been recommended for many years...

You'll have to navigate the site to the correct myth, as it didn't all hyperlink:

http://www.cfr.washington.edu/research.mulch/ myths/wound_sealer.pdf


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## Kneejerk Bombas (Nov 12, 2002)

You are in an Oak Wilt area, so you will want to paint wounds made during the growing season, late winter, and spring. The spray cans seem to work best for me.
There is research that covering a wound with plastic sandwich wrap for about a month, speeds wound closure considerably. This should be of use with high value trees and/or large wounds.
Most tree workers will fight it, but just leaving a wound to heal itself, will go out the window. Eventually, a treatment will be develeloped to insure a quick and disease free wound closure.


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## M.D. Vaden (Nov 12, 2002)

I see we have some discussion on this topic regarding "heal" versus "seal".

With advanced technology, maybe the ISA will soon have its own "SEAL TEAM". 

Mario Vaden
Landscape Designer / Arborist
M. D. Vaden Trees & Landscapes
Beaverton, Oregon


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## Kneejerk Bombas (Nov 12, 2002)

I don't get to excited about the heal/seal thing. It seems silly to correct somebody on their choice of words, then to replace it with a word that is technically just as incorrect.
Trees do heal themselves, not the way animals do, but heal just the same. And they do seal themselves also in some cases, but technically thats not what they are doing, so much as compartmentalizing. 
It's just a matter of semantics. I don't see it as a big enough aid in helping a customer understand what's going on, to verify trying to make them change their verbiage.



heal v. healed, heal·ing, heals. v. –tr. 1. To restore to health or soundness; cure. See Synonyms at cure. 2. To set right; repair: healed the rift between us. 3. To restore (a person) to spiritual wholeness. v. –intr. To become whole and sound; return to health. –heala·ble adj. 

. sealed, seal·ing, seals. 1. To affix a seal to in order to prove authenticity or attest to accuracy, legal weight, quality, or another standard. 2. a. To close with or as if with a seal. b. To close hermetically. c. To make fast or fill up, as with plaster or cement. d. To apply a waterproof coating to: seal a blacktop driveway.


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## M.D. Vaden (Nov 12, 2002)

We could even add the option of "isolate", even "confine."

To many individuals of rank and file society; "compartment" connotes, even denotes, an enclosed but vacant cavity - not a separate region filled with matter.

Words are interesting. In Indiana, one friend of mine quit using the term "trimming" after his customer corrected him, saying that trimming was something that is done to Holiday trees.

Yet when setting up advertising recently, I found that to list tree pruning under the heading of "tree trimming" was the most expensive by four-fold. 

That's because one of the largest reference terms for the public seeking tree service is "tree trimming."

So if certain arborists want to be exclusively elitest in their terminology, they may take a real cultural beating by being extreme.

It certainly is nice to have some flexibility to have fun with words.

Mario Vaden
Landscape Designer / Arborist
M.D. Vaden Trees & Landscapes
Beaverton, Oregon


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## Eric E. (Nov 12, 2002)

In the definition of heal that Mike posted, I see nothing that would describe a tree's reaction to injury. Could someone please explain how any of that heal definition applies to trees.


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## TREETX (Nov 12, 2002)

it doesn't - that was the point


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## Kneejerk Bombas (Nov 12, 2002)

Eric and Tex, Perhaps the definition of heal does not fit very well, unless you look at it with an open mind, and even then it's far from technically correct. 
What I do like about it is it's implied assosiation with tree health. Health, vigor, proper soil fertility, pH, and texture, all go well with healing. 
I have an apple tree that had an injury(lawn mower bump), as I look at it now it has completely healed, if you will. Callus wood grew adventitiously over the wound. This new wood is somewhat stronger. Farmers would scar young hickory trees, knowing that in a few years he could harvest the tree for stronger tool handles. 
Also, the tree has sent chemical signals throughout it's structure. A chemical barrier was formed around the injury to help protect it from the spread of decay. The trees resources were redistributed, imediately after the injury, to set up these defenses. Each subsequent year new wood was added, further covering the wound. 
I would say the tree is now healed. Resource allocation is back to normal, the scar is invisable, the area of the wound is "sealed", and the tree is growing normally.

Sealing, on the other hand, makes me think of putting a coating of copper arsinic on my deck. Ah heck, I can just bang my mower into the linden tree all I want, just so i hit it with some deck spray afterwards.
Think of a large open cavity, it's not really sealed is it? Yet, it may be healed, that is, the injury may not be growing in size, and the tree may doing just fine, slowly growing away in spite of the injury.
My point is that neither term is technically good enough to change to the other.


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## NeTree (Nov 12, 2002)

I rarely use sprays, and only on LARGE wounds, like 8" or so. I also like to mask off about an inch of the outer edge, to let the active tissues keep growing. For the most part, sprays and paints just slow down the closure process.


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## John Paul Sanborn (Nov 12, 2002)

The Shigo study that everyone partialy quotes showed that there was no real benefit tousing any pruning paint availible during the 70's, there was also a "statisticaly significant" higher incidance of decay on painted trees during the first 7 years after wounding. after 7 years the tow curves became statisticaly similar.

The argumanent behind the parsing of heal/seal is that many want to deviate from any type of animalesque anologies.

heal= regeneration of tissue to fill inand repair the wound. The damae may be present in scar tissue, but is now physicaly sound.

seal= generation of new tissue to close off and/or shore up the wound. The damage is always there and may cause weakness or defect later in the trees life.


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## Yellowdog (Jun 1, 2003)

*oak wilt*

In oak wilt country, is simple enamel spray paint sufficient to 'paint' the wound/pruning cuts?


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## TREETX (Jun 1, 2003)

According to the oak wilt guru at A&M, Dave Appel, any paint will do. You do not need to seal the wound, just cover it to prevent nitidulids from getting into the wounds.

It is all voodoo science anyway.

If you like the sealant stuff, Napa undercoat is good and cheap. I use the quickcolor from Home Depot at $0.96 a can. 

Personally, I think it is best to use the lighter spray products instead of the sealants.

I think the guys here that don't prune spanish oaks and live oaks in oak wilt country will get this one.


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## Bob Wulkowicz (Jun 2, 2003)

The <i>heal and seal</i> discussion is a nagging proof that we still get animal and tree mechanics and biologies all mixed up. It is a shame that we got started from a rhyming perspective, but there's no real apeal to stretching it out.

<i>My point is that neither term is technically good enough to change to the other.</i>, mutters the Massed one. How about just closure? Closure for the wounds created by a saw, or wounds that include a loss of bark?

We also have the illusion that when wounds close over, everything is OK.

That is sometimes, perhaps most times true, but closure also hides many significant dangers and hazards, that we choose not to recognize. We turn a surprising number of trees into hazard trees and never look back.



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As I remember, the disagreements between Neeley and Shigo were about wound closure times for flush cuts and Shigo cuts. This morphed into whether or not dressings speeded closure. It seemed that dressings didn't make any difference, which I expected in reading the studies because the mechanics ot the wound closing have literally no relationship to what film or goop is laid on the exposed wood to be covered.

My argument for years has been. it's stupid to stop exploring useful alternatives for trees because, and let's sing it in chorus, "Experts have determined...blah, blah, blah."

Experts determined nothing. They used a variety of contemporary goops labelled tree balm, or baum balm, and compared them to each other in a test of something completely irrelevant.

What we got was a misunderstood, prolonged apathy about helping trees with decay. Mostly because <u>that stuff</u>, back then when cars had big fins, was determined by a few studies not to have much effect, we stopped looking at anything for pruning cuts.

Fungal invasions are a big time problem for trees, trees have many techniques and mechanisms for thwarting the easy entry and passage of pathogens. But,we come along 200 million years later, give or take a few millenia, and saw every cylinder into an open cross section of hundreds of thousands of soda straws that lead down into the interior.

We leave that series of subway entrances alone, unguarded, unplugged, and talk awkwardly about the dilemma at bars and forums beause the background noise behind the howl of chainsaws is, "Experts have advised us...".

We happily left wound dressings because they were messy and difficult to wash out of clothes and off of us. I'm not so much interesed in ease of use as I am in the ease of rethinking our goals. If they can put cheese in an aerosol can, I'm sure they'll figure out a convenient, wife-friendly form of application. The shortfall is, what are we going to apply?

A question of enamel spray? Or underlayment? I suspect you can mix almost anything up and spray it. What will it be?


I'm for any kind of spraying or painting as an offset for the 20 years when we all said, <u>Don't</u>. But I'd also like to include observation and record-keeping to give us some clues. Forward movement in this business isn't exclusively the domain of academics and engineers who chronicly lecture us. People who work with their hands have minds too., don't they?



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My next rant will be on callus not being wound wood; and woundwood not being what we think it is. What we see closing over a wound is regular wood created by the cambium. We get a bit fooled by the appearance of the different bark as it closes, but that is simply juvenile bark. There is not wound wood beneath...

and a wound closes, on a mathematical basis, aided and much determined by the vigor of the tree, but never any faster than the time it takes for cambial cells to mature before their next division. 

For closure speed, tree paint need not apply.


Bob Wulkowicz


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## John Paul Sanborn (Jun 2, 2003)

Hmmm, on the basic premis on your rant....the wound paint is for a mask of the wound so that vectors of oak wilt are not attracted to feed.

Some university studies were done and the found a statisticaly significant differance it morbidity in the unpainted trees. 

As an aside, I understand a review of some stree tre pruning showed that oaks pruned in winter had a higher rate of infection too. Not enough time for blockage of codit wall one, drying of wood??

Some say that common flys will feed on the fungal mats and then go to the wounds to drink. There are questions on the atractive effects of wounding to bark beetles (nitidulids), that the twig/bud expantion gives off more then enough scent to attract them and is what they want more then a broken branch. Since they feed on twigs...


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## Yellowdog (Jun 2, 2003)

Very interesting JOhn Paul..
You are saying that the beetles prefer new growth versus open wounds? Hmmmm. I think there a number of ways to infect a tree. That surely sounds plausible. 

From what I have seen on observation here in my neck of the woods (Texas hill country), is that oak wilt seems to follow paths of large creeks and the river as well as the path of powerlines. Both of those observations, while not scientific, seem to tell me that areas where trees are damaged by our frequent floods seem to be infected (unless the flood waters did something to the oaks) and the areas where powerlines were opened up by chainsaws seems to me that injuries/chainsaw wounds account for a great deal of the infections. This observation doesn't account for areas where oak wilt just seems to sporadically pop up. I think the latter could be another disease or an excess of carpenter ants (can anyone confirm whether or not carpenter ants can kill oaks?).

I don't see a lot of young trees here, however, but areas with seemingly healthy trees and no injuries all of sudden have symptoms of oak wilt. This could be infected bugs feeding on soft, new growth?

By the way, how are you guys treating oak wilt? A company I work with uses only vitamins and stays away from antifungals and Alamo type injections. Any thoughts?


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## Reed (Jun 2, 2003)

You're observant.

ROW's are virulant alleys, creeks not so much by wounding (by our research) but moisture availability. Notice drought impedes progression of disease. 

The original Natidulid study (implicating a boring beetle vector) captured an insect with spores attached, therefore all beetles are culprits, no study yet on fireant or other nesting or parasitic critters, including mammals. I associate moisture-seeking ant activity with tree decline from root structure parasitism - predisposing a tree to disease from decreased vigor or actual spore transmission. 

We commissioned an air-sample study that captured sexual spores at 5,000 feet altitude - simple indication that insects alone do not hold monopoly on disease movement. Air flow, squirrels, woodpeckers, man. Look at the growth pattern of oak motts - clonal replicates of earlier growth, all interconnected by root structure - same tree even though there may be 160 stems covering 15 acres. Innoculate one......the rest get hit. Nix trenching advice completely.

When you mention "vitamins" I get suspicious. Many people have jumped on the badwagon since our early work indicated an compartmentalizing response to fungal invasions, post-stress from changes in air quality on the Plateau. Part of the formulation that was tested at U.C. Riverside was stolen, but not an effective or complete mechanism - didn't stop the greedy from promoting this "alternative". Good work has suffered as a result of promoting a treatment that "increases" autoimmune response to disease presense, too many trees dying at sites getting these treatments. There are at least two outfits - one in Pipe Creek, the other in Boerne (and a branch in Marble Falls) that promote this stolen formula (I know, because I formulated it in 1990). There has been litigation over it. 

My testing in trees pre-symptomatic indicated serious base-line deficiencies in Zinc, Copper, Nickle, and Iron, the treatment included boosting these reductions along with a cell stimulant to promote division and growth by hormone injection directly into vascular tissue, broadcast of phosphorous for moisture relationships - the products being promoted exempt these necessary componants, yet show photo essays that were taken by me with my camera on my test/control specimens. Simple theft, but this is America, so....

Be careful when working with these guys - they may be good folk, but I advise against entering contractual relationships with them unless it's for take-down referrals or unrelated disease work. Many homeowners spent good money for serious losses. But, the same could be said for injection of the sterol-inhibiting fungistats.


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## Bob Wulkowicz (Jun 2, 2003)

> _Originally posted by John Paul Sanborn _
> 
> *Hmmm, on the basic premis on your rant....the wound paint is for a mask of the wound so that vectors of oak wilt are not attracted to feed.*
> 
> ...




There's also a big difference in bark thickness and the available surface area of a cylinder beneath thin bark compared to a tiny layer of a concentric circle in an exposed stub. Do they want to peel back some young thin bark to get to the sweets--or do they want to stick their cherubic faces into a mass of tiny splinters?



Tired in Pokipsee.


Bob Wulkowicz


PS: Did anyone really reread the posts on disinfecting and spore transfer? What's the half-life of Chlorox in an open bucket in the sun? Is chain oil a vector for oak wilt? Or, perhaps us?


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## John Paul Sanborn (Jun 2, 2003)

Chainsaws doen't kill trees, People with chainsaws kill trees.

Actually I was sorta commneting on your going off on a tangent, maybe misunderstanding what the last post on wound paint was about????

I know what I'm saying, your just off in your own little world. But that's a good thing, philosophers are supposed to do that.

Higher rates of death in the trees not painted lead to the recomendation for painting of wounds when the fungal mats are active. They were not sure why, but the fly activity was mentioned and the statistical importance of survival rates in painted trees made it seam wise.

Many bark beetles like to feed on the second years twig bark, then lay eggs on/in the mature bark. I'm pretty shure H. rufipies (sp?) follows this MO.

As for the heal/seal thing, I'm just supporting my buddy Tom. I't his baby. I'm all for closure, except when a news vulture is asking the mother of a dead child if they will find it. 

Seems you must skim my maunderings as I do yours, wounding and CODIT are 3 dimentional events that exist in the tree till it rots. Which is my oft expressed concern for removing large limbs.

Do you have any research material on the use of Subdue, or like products, in wound paint?

In all honesty I think we do agree on a lot of issues, I just like pulling you chain now and then.


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## Bob Wulkowicz (Jun 3, 2003)

> _Originally posted by John Paul Sanborn _
> 
> *Chainsaws doen't kill trees, People with chainsaws kill trees.*
> 
> ...




If that's what you're interested in, there's a lot of competition in my spam mail for pulling and lengthening my chain. Either get in line, or submit letters of reference from arborist friends. 


Wulkowicz


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