About two years ago we replaced the water filtration system in the pump house next to this beautiful 14 yr old eucalyptus tree, with no thought to the runoff from the regular self-cleaning cycle, which is just dumped outside the shed through a drain pipe. The previous system did not use salt, but was a reverse osmosis system, and the runoff simply had a lot of minerals, mostly iron in it. For the first year we noticed a few brown tips on the regularly gray-blue leaves, and thought we'd better get an extension pipe to route the runoff away from the root system of the tree. But it just continued to turn brown through the winter, even though the salty runoff is now routed 40 feet away. We have clay soil, and I think it just got too saturated with salt which, of course, does not percolate easily though the clay soil.
So, we though the tree would completely die, but now it is putting on a furry coat of new growth densely around the trunk, and up about 10 feet of this 30 foot tree, and there is one lower branch that has live leaves all the way to the tip. It seems it wants to live.
So, should we cut our losses, mourn the tree and cut it down? Or give it some special attention, and let it try to recover, which I don't mind doing, if I knew what to do for it. We are patient people, and would rather save it.
Oh, and we live in SW Washington State, in zone 8B.
So tree people......any suggestions?
