drooping lilac leaves, holes punched everywhere!

A month ago I planted a strong healthy 3 foot tall lilac. After not too long it began to droop. I thought it was the heat, so I made sure I watered it thoroughly. Then leaves and then branches began to droop and dry up. I was looking at the leaves the other day and realized that all of them had neat little holes scissored into them, like someone had taken a hole punch to them.

And now I've noticed that my smaller lilacs are also being hole punched. I never see an insect or any other sign except for the holes punched in the leaves. I'm afraid I'm going to lose every lilac!

I just bought my first house, and thus my first garden, a couple months ago. I've looked forward to this for 30 years, and I'm thinking I'm just going to have to face the fact that I can't make anything grow!

There are some other problems that I'm going to list separately, but either my seeds don't grow, or they get eaten by bugs, or they get eaten by something probably four-footed. I've had poor little sprouts last less than a day out of the ground. I'm practically sickened to tears.

The holes could be leaf cutter bees, and if that's what it is I don't think it's likely to kill the plant, just make the leaves a little ugly (unless you have a huge number of bees chewing on the plant, I guess if they destroy enough area of enough leaves the plant won't be happy).

I don't think that the holes in the leaves are necessarily related to the drooping and drying up, those could be related to cultural problems resulting from how the lilac was planted, or could be a fungal infection of some sort. Are your other lilacs older/more established than the 3 ft one you mention that you just planted? And are they showing the same drooping and drying up, or do they just have the holes in their leaves? I think these are two separate problems.

Well, it's definitely a leaf cutter bee because I saw one today, landing on my lilac leaves and making little motions with its mandibles. Now how do I get rid of them? The occasional little hole is one thing, but this lilac is being eaten alive.

This, a James McFarlane, was the first, the biggest, and the healthiest lilac I planted, almost a month ago. It was even blooming in the store when I bought it. It sat on my patio in its 5 gal pot for a week or two before being planted and did just fine. I wanted to make sure it was "hardened off" and used to the weather before I planted it in the ground.

I'd read that you shouldn't do a lot about fertilizing lilacs. That can even backfire. So I dug a deep hole and put it in the ground, even with the soil line, and watered it thoroughly. It kept being wilted when I'd come home at night, but would perk up the next day after a thorough watering. Then it kept being wilted no matter what I did. That's when I noticed the holes.

The wilting leaves also look discolored. I don't know if that's significant.

This month, June, has been horribly hot, with temperatures up to 100 one day. That's not good for transplants, I know. I thought maybe the plant was just suffering from the heat.

The next lilac was one I got from Gurney's, a bare root Old-Fashioned. It looked healthy and was already sprouting when I got it. This time, I mixed some garden soil with my dirt, watered the hole before I put the lilac in, watered it when the hole was half filled in, and watered it thoroughly when I was done planting the lilac. After about a week, the lilac started putting out new growth. There are a couple holes in its leaves, too, but it looks quite healthy otherwise.

The third lilac was an Adelaide Dunbar from Home Depot. This time I mixed organic garden soil and a cup or two of compost/manure with my dirt and also watered it a couple times before I was done with planting. The leaves on this one look a little scorched, and it has holes, too, but otherwise it looks healthy. It's not putting out new growth, though.

I also have two smaller lilacs, Ellen Willmot and Krasavitsa Muscvy, in pots on my picnic table on the (covered) patio. The Muscvy has some holes, but both look healthy. The Ellen, which I don't think was packaged properly--it looked like it was bent putting it in the box and a lot of leaves were bedraggled and ripped off--is putting out a lot of new growth.

Any ideas on what I can do?

Some leaf cutter bees can be helpful as pollinators even though they do do some leaf damage. It sounds like your other lilacs are withstanding some leaf-cutting fine, so I tend to agree with ecrane3 that the wilting might be due to something else and may only be being aggrevated by the cutting.

I'm no expert, but with vegetables, flowering in the pot is not always a good thing. I may be wrong, but I think it may be the same for some bushes, because if it was already flowering, there is a better likelyhood of it maybe having been rootbound (ascan occur with flowering vegetables). If the bush was rootbound in the pot, this might explain why it kept drooping. When bushes are rootbound, you usually have to cut into the rootball or break it up by ripping the rootball in a few places, otherwise the roots don't grow beyond their original state and will therefore wilt as soon as the water leaves that original rootball - which can be quickly if water can't penetrate well in the first place. Ifthe soil around the plant is tough and wasn't amended, this might only make the problem worse. I may be wrong, but I suspect that if you dug up your large lilac bush, the roots would still be in the same clump that they were in when you planted it with no new growth outwards. And if that is the case, it might explain why your bush is so unhealthy.

Anyone else have any theories?

I'm even more positive now that the drooping and wilting has nothing to do with the leaf cutter bees. You mentioned that the bare root one you planted is doing much better...a lot of trees and shrubs will do better if you plant them bare root rather than with the soil that came in the container. When you plant the plant directly from the container and leave the container soil with it, your hole in the ground can almost become like another pot (especially if it's clay soil), and your plant's roots will want to stay in the container soil rather than growing out into the garden soil. Nightbloom is right about if the plant was rootbound when you planted it that this will happen, but it can happen even if the plant wasn't rootbound, all it needs is for the container soil to be a happier place for it than your garden soil and it'll do this. And then you combine that with extremely hot temperatures and you have a recipe for disaster! Unfortunately, this is not a good time of year to be uprooting things and transplanting them...I'm afraid if you leave it where it is it will die, but there's also risk in pulling it out and trying to fix the situation.

What I would probably do is dig up the plant and put it into a bigger pot than what it was in before, making sure that you take care of any encircling roots in the process, cut back some of the top growth if necessary, and then keep it in the pot somewhere not exposed to full sun while it recovers. If it recovers, then I would wait until the appropriate time of year for planting in your area and plant it again, removing as much of the container soil as possible before planting (I know here we can plant in the fall, but with your cold winters I'm not sure if that's recommended or if you're supposed to wait until spring). Or if you don't like the idea of potting it up again, I would still pull it out of the ground, get rid of as much of the container soil as you can that's stuck to the roots and in the hole, then plant it again using garden soil to backfill the hole. You'll need to be extra vigilant about watering and especially if your weather continues to be hot, the heat may be too much stress for the plant and it may not make it.

This is what I would do, but I would definitely look for a second opinion from one of the real experts around here before you listen to me!

What you're saying makes sense, although I don't look forward to the idea of digging up a three foot tree again. But what I could do is dig it up and put it into a really large container with packaged garden soil (and compost?) and put it on my back patio. It was happy there before. I could leave it there either until early September when the temperatures drop a little, or until next spring, although I don't know how it could overwinter outside in a container, although it would be protected some. I could prune back the worst of the canes--I've heard that pruning doesn't hurt a lilac, although I might be sacrificing next year's flowers.

My Dunbar was planted with garden soil and compost, but it's been showing some scorched looking leaves, similar to what began with the McFarlane. I didn't do anything with the root ball on that one, either. I suppose I could dig it up, too, try to entangle the root ball some, and then plant it back either in the ground or in the McFarlane's old 5 gal pot.

Everything I read said that lilacs were very hardy plants. Just plop them in the ground and watch them grow. Certainly when I was a kid my parents never did anything about fertilizing or treating the lilacs. They just ignored them, and the lilacs went wild.

In fact, I've heard that you don't fertilize lilacs or amend the soil in any way.

I do want to try to save this guy.

Lilacs should be low maintenance once you get them planted so that their roots can grow correctly. You shouldn't have to fertilize or amend the soil in any way...what I'm saying to do is to dump it in as much of your natural garden's soil as possible (when you plant it in the garden...if you put it in a container it needs to have potting soil, not garden soil). And once it's back in the ground, all you should have to do is water it. Basically what you're doing by planting it straight from the container is unintentionally amending the soil. Sometimes you can plant stuff this way and get away with it, either because you got lucky or your garden soil wasn't too different from the container soil so the roots were able to grow beyond the original hole (which is maybe why your parents were able to do it...either that or they were planting bare-root lilacs), but other times, especially if you have clay soil you will run into problems.

Okay, if I understand correctly what you're saying, the potting soil around the lilac roots still acts like a container. The roots have no desire to go out into my sandy garden soil. So it's suffering from a too small container, as it were?

I talked to a woman at Home Depot today who said that it sounded like I was overwatering it. I was watering it once or twice a day because the man I'd spoken to before said that in this heat that's what I should do.

I'm so confused! I can't even grow "easy" plants! And now the leaves of the bare root lilac I planted, which had been doing great, are wilting. No other symptoms except for some leaf cutter bee holes. And the leaves of the Dunbar are still turning brown from the center out and drying up.

The only good news is that the two small lilacs in containers on my patio are still happy. But they can't stay in containers forever. And I don't want to kill them by putting them in the ground, which is what I'm apparently doing with the others.

I chose lilacs partly because they were an easy, fuss-free plant. If I can't help but kill them, maybe I should just stick some plastic plants in the ground.

Gardens are supposed to be a source of joy. My weed-choked dust patch is just making me depressed. :-(

If you have sandy soil then you probably aren't getting the "container" effect, that's something that happens more with clay soil, and it seems like more people in the country have clay soil than sandy. Although I suppose it could happen with the sandy soil as well--with clay the roots stay in your original potting soil because the clay is hard to penetrate, but maybe with sandy soil even though the roots could penetrate the sand easily, they may want to stay in the potting soil because there's more moisture and nutrients there than in the garden soil. I know for sure this is a phenomenon that can occur with clay soil, but have no idea whether it could happen in sandy soil as well, I'm just speculating.

I really think your problem is that you picked the wrong time of year to plant the lilacs, and if you plant them during the correct time of year, they will do just fine. Planting in the summer is a very risky proposition, the sun and heat can create a lot of stress for them, and their root systems aren't capable yet of getting as much water from the soil as they need, so you end up watering them more because it looks like they need it, but then their roots end up rotting because of too much water.

If you can, I would take the ones that are dying and try putting them back in the containers until fall (if that's an appropriate time to plant in your area--it is here but not everywhere). They may still not make it, but it sounds like you're not being successful in getting them established in the ground now so I think if you leave them there for sure they'll die, and if you try potting them up and waiting you may have a chance to save them.

I put them in the ground because I was told NOT to leave them in the containers. But I think you're right. The two still in the containers are doing fine. They're out in the heat on my patio, but they're not in direct sun except for a couple hours in the afternoon.

Should I put them in the same containers they came in, or find slightly bigger containers for them?

And now a clump of leaves on my bare root lilac has begun to wilt. (Sigh.)

About a week after I planted the big lilac, our temperatures soared to above 100 degrees. I'm sure that did NOT help.

Thanks for your input.

Plants are generally better off in the ground than in containers, unfortunately though when it's summer and it's real hot out you're probably better off taking your chances and leaving it in the container. One size up is probably best if you have them available, but if they haven't grown since you planted them and they weren't rootbound (or almost rootbound) when you bought them then the original containers might be OK.

Can you plant in the fall in your area? I know here that's the absolute best time of year to plant things because the heat is not so great and the winter rains are on their way, but in areas where you can get snow I don't know if that's still a good time to plant or not. If you can plant them in the fall I would do that, otherwise if you're worried about overwintering, you can actually dig holes in the ground (preferably in a somewhat protected area that won't get real bad winds, etc), stick the pots right in the holes, then put mulch around them and they should hold until spring.

Here in Colorado lilacs can be planted in either fall or winter. They need some time to get situated before it gets really hot (which I didn't do) or before it starts freezing.

I really intended to plant everything much sooner, but my closing date on this house kept getting pushed back. Originally I had planned to be in by the end of March and then start planting in April. As it turned out I didn't close and get moved in until almost the end of May, so I started planting on Memorial Day weekend.

If I could figure out how, I'd upload some pictures of the lilac. I got my camera up and running today and took some pictures before it started raining. I tried to upload a picture once but was unsuccessful.

It's raining hard right now. I certainly don't have to worry about anything drying out any time soon!

This rain is good for the eve of the Fourth, too. The hooligans with their illegal fireworks will probably not want to get soaked, and the fire danger just went way down.

If you can get some pics that would be great--it's often easier to figure out what's going on when you can see a pic instead of just a description. I think it's the summer planting that did it, I've had plants of mine do similar things when I planted them in summer (always impatient, didn't want to wait until fall!).

To upload, your pic should be in jpg format, otherwise it won't work. Just below where you're typing in your post you'll see a blank line for an image, and a browse button, hit the browse button and go to the folder on your computer where the pic is saved. It can sometimes take a little while to upload it depending on how big the file is and how fast your internet connection is, so if it seems like it's taking a while be patient and it'll go through.

>>just bought my first house, and thus my first garden, a couple months ago. I've looked forward to this for 30 years, and I'm thinking I'm just going to have to face the fact that I can't make anything grow!

Okay, I'm going to try to upload some pictures. This is the James McFarlane that I think I'm probably losing. You can see the damage that the leafcutter bees have done to it, too.

Here's the Adelaide Dunbar, which has never really drooped, but you see what the leaves are doing? I don't know why. I'm assuming it's something different from the McFarlane.

For a change of pace, here are the happy little lilacs on my patio, still in their pots.

So, do the pictures help? Anybody got a better idea what's wrong with my poor babies?

I am absolutely thrilled that I now can upload pictures. I don't know why it didn't work that one time.

If you are watering these plants 1-2 times a day and have been since you put them in the ground, you are overwatering them and I bet if you pull them up, the roots will be dark/dead/dying. Only water if the dirt down a few inches is really dry. Giving them a good watering-and the soil around them should last a few days-even with hot temps.

The leaves on the A. dunbar are sunburned, but that won't kill them, its the overwatering.

McFarlane does look overwatered to me, and I agree with tigerlily about the sunburn on Dunbar. I would probably leave it alone, just watch the watering so that it doesn't end up like McFarlane, but lilacs generally like full sun so it should be OK next year (if the nursery you bought it from had it in a location where it got more shade than where you planted it, sometimes it takes the plant a little while to adjust to the extra sun, and if you don't expose it gradually to increasing amts of sun then it'll sunburn like this).

On McFarlane, if the roots are already rotten then there's not be much you can do, but if some of the roots are still healthy then you might be able to salvage it by correcting the watering, although I still think taking it out of the ground and potting it up might be better since you can get it out of the beating down sun which will create overall a less stressful situation for it--if it's starting to suffer from root rot plus has the sun beating down on it, just stopping overwatering it may not be enough. If you do pull it out, look at the roots, if they are nasty and dark looking that means they're rotting and dead, but if there are still some healthy white roots you could try cutting out the dead ones and repotting it (cut off some top growth too, proportional to the amount of roots it's lost).

We had a hard rain yesterday, soaked the ground and it's still damp. Today it's 82 and mostly sunny.

And the McFarlane has perked up! What leaves are left are no longer drooping.

This lilac keeps playing with my head. I'll stop watering them, except if it doesn't rain for several days, and see what happens. The ground is certainly going to remain damp for a while.

The first guy at Home Depot TOLD me to water twice a day. Hmph!

I would not generally trust garden advice from HD...I'm sure there are occasional garden center staff there who actually do know something, but that's definitely not a requirement to get the job!

Glad to hear McFarlane has perked up...hopefully it can stay that way! And it's a good sign that maybe its roots aren't too far gone yet. I wonder if it was a lot of heat stress contributing to its appearance too? I know I've lost plants due to this, like I said in an earlier post their roots have a hard time absorbing enough water to keep the leaves from wilting when it's real hot out, but then if you water them more it actually hurts instead of helps. To know when to water, I would stick your finger a couple inches down into the soil and see how wet it feels, and use that to judge whether it needs to be watered or not. And if you start watering it correctly and it still droops in the heat, I wonder if you could get some shadecloth and rig up a little shade for it so it doesn't get the full blasting of the sun?

Here's a picture of the perked up McFarlane. (Man, I love digital cameras!) If it's perking up, there must be some life to it.

But here's a shot of part of my bare root lilac, which had been doing wonderfully up until a couple days ago.

But not all of it is that sad. The leaves down near the bottom still look fine.

And here's a picture of the Spanish Inquisition coming round the side of the house....