Rutgers Cooperative Extension
A boxwood per day helps keep the doctors away! All of us here in the Plant Diagnostic Lab must be pretty healthy then–since the boxwood blight outbreak in 2013, we get a dose of dead boxwood almost every day.
Boxwood blight leaf lesions. Photo: Richard Buckley, Rutgers PDL
Boxwood samples have been coming into the Plant Diagnostic Laboratory on a daily basis since the winter. Most of them have been diagnosed with winter damage, boxwood leafminer, or Volutella stem and leaf blight. Yesterday, we got our first sample with boxwood blight! The situation was typical of several others in New Jersey – new transplants this spring and then a bunch of dead shrubs mid-summer.
Boxwood blight infected sample is on the floor in the black plastic bag. Winter damaged boxwood sample is on the counter. Photo: Richard Buckley, Rutgers PDL
Just a short note today to keep you on your toes! And by the way, please notice how the sample was submitted – an entire plant, double-bagged…
If you haven’t noticed, spring has sprung in earnest. Spring flowering trees and shrubs have popped and are already fading. The buds of many other plants are breaking everywhere. Right along with the plants come the critters.
Freshly emerged Boxwood leafminer adult and pupal exuviae. Photo: Sabrina Tirpak, Rutges PDL
I heard through the grapevine about a site with some dead boxwoods, so I went to take a look and here is what I saw.
Boxwood garden. Photo: Richard Buckley, Rutgers PDL
Samples of boxwood infected with the fungus Cylindrocladium pseudonaviculatum, the cause of boxwood blight, have been confirmed by the Rutgers Plant Diagnostic Laboratory and the New Jersey Department of Agriculture Laboratory in recent days. This is the first report of the disease is New Jersey.
Boxwood blight leaf lesion. Photo: Sabrina Tirpak, Rutgers PDL
If you have boxwoods on your property, bend over and take a listen. No, you haven’t suddenly become the plant whisperer! What you are hearing is not the boxwood talking, but the late-stage larvae of the boxwood leafminer, Monarthropalpusi flavus. It literally sounds like the snap, crackle and pop of a bowl of rice cereal. [Read more…]
