Subject: Re: How to kill a tree?

From: [email-masked](Michael L Roginsky )
Date: 15 Feb 1996 22:41:16 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Marti Rijken)
writes: 
>
>I hope planting trees gets as much attention as this thread, but
>nevertheless I would like to share the following experience with you.
>
>My father was annoyed by the multitude of roots in his lawn of his
>favorite Prunus serrulata. A friend told him to put copper nails in
>the roots to let them disappear. Well, he was right. The roots
>disappeared... because the tree died after a few months...
>
>Was my father just unlucky, or is copper really this bad for trees?
>-- 
>
>   @..@    Marti Rijken   [email-masked]
>  (----)   http://dds.nl/~mrijken/
> ( >__< )  OSTYPE=Linux; export OSTYPE

>Your dad was a wise man. Copper sulfate is very poisonous to plant and
man. Ever heard of Copper Hill, NC? There copper was mined and
extracted from ore. The contamination killed all vegetation around that
little town.......no grass, no trees, nothing but people that
eventually got very sick. To this day very few trees emerged, about 20
years since the EPA cleaned the smelter up. But grass still doesn't
thrive there. I would be suspicious of the ground aquifers having been
contaminated as well.

---

From: "Paul T. Riddell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 1996 01:06:26 -0600

I'll add my 2 pfennigs to this:  I've seen the same thing in Michigan, 
in particular around copper smelters in the Lower Peninsula, when I 
was a kid.  Quite a few places in the American West suffer from the 
problems with copper sulfate:  leachings from old mines have done 
wonders to kill off most local vegetation (interestingly, someone's 
doing interesting experiments with a variety of moss that grows 
abundantly among the leachings;  the idea is that it concentrates 
copper and other metals in commercially recoverable amounts, thus 
allowing the possibility of cleaning waste water of heavy metals by 
growing and then processing the moss on contaminated sewer sludge).

  One last little bit:  the next time you go to the local aquarium, 
note how many tanks have starfish in them.  Copper sulfate is used as 
a treatment for many fish diseases, but even tiny amounts kill 
starfish and other echinoderms.  In most cases, the starfish in 
aquariums are casts of originals, and the few that appear in the flesh 
(or armor?) are isolated to tanks where nobody will apply copper 
sulfate.

  Cordially,

  Paul T. Riddell
  http://www.merid.com
  Check out our VRML page...