Will winter's bitter cold damage plants?

The new year is arriving in a blast of bitter cold. People can snuggle indoors where it's warm, but what about plants? Will the harsh weather do them harm?

"For plants that are fully dormant, there shouldn't be any problem," said Sharon Yiesla, plant knowledge specialist at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle. Dormancy is the resting state that plants enter to protect themselves against winter cold and drought.

The aboveground parts of trees and shrubs have bark to protect them. Buds at the tips of branches are shielded by bud scales. Perennials have allowed their stalks and leaves to die back already. Plants' roots are still alive, but they are safe in the ground. "As long as the roots are underground, they are protected," Yiesla said.

The main risk she sees is for evergreens, which may not have fully entered their dormant state because of warm weather in the fall. Evergreen needles retain some water all winter and could be dried out by bitter cold and wind.

"Depending on how long the cold goes on and how low the temperature falls, we may see a little more winter damage on evergreens than we sometimes do," she said. "But it won't be apparent until spring, and there's nothing a homeowner can do about it now."

The greatest danger isn't from cold, but from warm weather that can follow. Chicago often swings between cold and warm spells, and plants can be harmed by the quick shifts. When soil warms, dormant plants may start to wake up and then be hit hard by the next cold snap.

Plants with shallow roots, such as hydrangeas and hellebores, are especially vulnerable, along with species that are not quite hardy here, such as oakleaf hydrangea and butterfly bush.

"The best way to prevent damage from freeze-thaw cycles is to make sure there's a layer of mulch over the roots," Yiesla said. The mulch will insulate the soil, so it stays evenly cold.

You can use wood chips or fallen leaves, but another source of mulch is handy at this time of year: evergreen boughs. "Cut up your Christmas tree and lay the branches on the soil around vulnerable plants," she said. "They will help insulate the soil."

Be good to your house plants, they’ll be good to you

 Indoor plants are wonderful things. They are green and beautiful and even shiny, if you bother to dust the leaves or give them a bath now and then. House plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, helping to clear the air and make the inside of your home a healthier place for you and your family. Indoor plants are especially nice to have around in the autumn and through the winter when the garden outside is often less attractive and accessible.

But at the moment I feel a touch guilty talking about house plants. A few weeks ago, I finally had to toss a rubber plant that had died, slowly and painfully, fallen brown leaf by fallen brown leaf. It was beautiful when I bought it and plunked it down on the raised hearth, on the wall farthest from the living room's largest window. It was big and gorgeous for several weeks, sitting in a large green pot, but then the leaves began to brown, curl and fall. Watching this lovely plant die was heartbreaking, but did I do any research to find out what was wrong? Unfortunately, no, until it was too late. That was when I discovered the poor thing wasn't getting enough light and was possibly getting too much water. I moved it into the dining room next to a window, but by then the die was cast.

Tossing that rubber plant was a rather expensive lesson in doing research sooner rather than later. I've had great luck with other house plants — mother-in-law's tongue, pothos, and various palms — and thought I knew what I was doing. But no. Googling “rubber plant” after I bought it would have saved me much grief, and my rubber plant might still be with us.

If you do a bit of research first, raising house plants and keeping them healthy isn't difficult. I've had some house plants for many years. I moved nine months ago, and it took a while to find the optimal spot for all of them. But here's the thing. With these plants, I paid attention to their ups and downs and responded accordingly. For some crazy reason, I had too much faith in that poor rubber plant to pay proper attention.

House plants do need different care from outdoor plants. They are highly sensitive to light levels, and less water is usually preferable to too much. But it is easy to find many indoor plants that thrive in many different light conditions and that conform to your personal plant care philosophy, whether it be to do everything on a carefully set schedule or on a more catch-as-catch-can basis.

For the catch-as-catch-can indoor gardener, the mother-in-law's tongue and pothos in my living room are the perfect solution. Mother-in-law's tongue, also known as the snake plant, does well in low light and is almost impossible to kill. It can be watered as seldom as once a month. The pothos vine likes a bit more light (I combined the two plants just for the photo), but it will signal when it needs water by starting to look limp and wilted. A good soaking in the kitchen sink will refresh it.

Children will enjoy the pothos vine because it is simple to create more plants. When a vine gets too long, just cut it off and put the cut end in a jar filled with water on a window sill. It will grow roots and can then be planted in a new pot. Where you had one plant, you now have two.

There are dozens of other indoor possibilities. The air plant is extremely easy to grow, and no soil is involved. Just soak each plant for two or three hours every ten days or so, and they will thrive on a saucer or dish on a counter or bookcase in indirect light.

Aloe likes indirect light and a good soak about once a week. Aloe also has excellent healing properties. If someone gets a burn in the kitchen, break a leaf open and smear the aloe sap on the burn.

Diffenbachia likes filtered light, perhaps by a curtained window. Spider plants like lots of light and a weekly watering. Peace lilies prefer indirect light. They are another plant that lets you know when it needs water. African violets are lovely in a kitchen window.

Palm trees are often easy to grow indoors and may remind you of sunnier climes in the depths of winter. The parlor palm prefers low light and may suffer if exposed to direct sunlight. It grows very slowly and may take years to reach its full height of three to four feet. I have had great luck with the Kentia palm. In its native habitat, it can reach 60 feet. But indoors it tops out at 6 to 12 feet. This plant benefits from periodic soaking in a bucket or deep sink to thoroughly wet the entire root ball.

Orchids are another winter delight. I avoid them in the summer when I'm running ceiling fans because the plants dry out.

Of course nothing beats a Christmas cactus at this time of year. Give it indirect light and occasional water, and its festive color will brighten your holidays into the new year.

Meet the Overcompensators, Plants That Get Tougher and Meaner When Attacked

If plants could be stars in a cowboy film, the scarlet gilia would be one of the meanest wildflowers west of the Mississippi.

You can find it standing tall among the sagebrush on mountainsides, its red flowers blazing. Drought can't always stop it. Shade won't faze it. And when mule deer and elk start grazing on it early in the season, it comes back bigger and stronger, with more defenses and a posse of new plants.

Biologists call outlaw plants like this the overcompensators.

“It's a little counterintuitive,” said Miles Mesa, a graduate student at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign who led a new study into these types of plants. “After some animal comes by and eats it, the plant actually does better.”

In the study published this month in the journal Ecology, scientists showed for the first time that in an experiment, damaging some plants set off a molecular chain of events that caused them to grow back bigger, and produce more seeds and chemical defenses simultaneously. At the genetic level, the two tactics for plant survival worked hand in hand — at least in Arabidopsis thaliana, a kind of mustard plant often used for research.

Ken Paige, an evolutionary ecologist also at he University of Illinois and principal investigator of the study, first observed overcompensation in the scarlet gilia in 1987. He described plants that would make more flowers, stems and seeds when their main stems were cut off or eaten.

At the time, being eaten was believed to be bad for plants — always. It took a decade's worth of seeing the contrary for other biologists to believe it.

Dr. Paige started looking for a molecular mechanism behind overcompensation in some versions of Arabidopsis. As he damaged their main stems, he started seeing indications that not only did they get bushier and produce more seeds, but they also ramped up their chemical defenses.

At one point in time, theory pitted regrowth, also known as tolerance, against defense: with limited energy, a plant had to pick one or the other.

But in the past decade, more researchers can't find a trade-off, said Anurag Agrawal, an ecologist at Cornell University who studies plant-herbivore interactions and was not involved in the study.

Dr. Paige thinks a special process at the molecular level helps plants that overcompensate employ both strategies.

Most plants respond to damage with a process called endoreduplication, in which a cell can copy its DNA over and over without splitting into two cells. This gives the plant bigger cells with multiple energy factories to accomplish a variety of tasks. Many damaged plants only show minimal levels of endoreduplication. But the overcompensators go into overdrive with the process.

In the case of the study's mustard plants, they were able to grow bigger and also produce glucosinolate, the sulfurish, bitter chemical compound in mustard, kale, cabbage and horseradish.

And the new research finds that when it comes to building up tolerance or defenses, for at least some plants, you can't have one without the other.

“What this paper shows is that, in practice, defense and regrowth actually go hand-in-hand because the genetics of defense and regrowth are similar,” Josh Banta a biologist at The University of Texas at Tyler, who was not involved in the study. “Like it or not, theory be darned.”

But even the baddest cowboys are not immortal, the researchers found. If they cut the main stem and 75 percent of its leaves, even overcompensators can't rebound.

This tough guy tactic may be a special case, said Dr. Agrawal, but Mr. Mesa and Dr. Paige think it could be generalized to many other plants. Depending on much that turns out to be true, future research could one day help farmers grow super crops that made more food without having to use as many pesticides. But as the story often goes for basic genetic research on crops, results that could be applied are a ways off.

Ecuadorians prefer non-native plants for medicinal use

 

The beautiful frailejón plant (Espeletia pycnophylla Cuatrec., Asteraceae) in the páramo region of northern Ecuador during a visit by author Georgia Hart. Frailejón is utilized in multiple ways for medicine including in the treatment of arthritis, earache, headache, deafness and prevention of hair loss. Photo credit: Neagha Leonard.

Plant medicine is practiced widely across the world, however, there is concern that introduced plants could be replacing the use of native plants for medicine in various regions. It is critical to understand the potential influence of introduced plant use on native plant treatments. With hundreds of thousands of native plant treatments used by indigenous peoples worldwide that have yet to be fully examined, there is a likelihood that cures for many common maladies such as hair loss, arthritis, dementia and even cancers might already exist. This research provides valuable information for possible approaches to preserving that rich cultural knowledge.

To better understand why people select non-native plants for medicine, Georgia Hart, a PhD student in the Department of Botany at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, led a group of international ethnobotany researchers on a bioinformatics project focused on medicinal plant use in Ecuador.

The team studied the use of introduced, or non-native, plants for medicine in Ecuador, using a bioinformatics approach to generate new understanding in ethnobotany by synthesizing information from two large databases. The first database, The Catalogue of Vascular Plants of Ecuador, includes more than 17,000 plant species. The Catalogue of Useful Plants of Ecuador is a compilation of more than 40,000 recorded medicinal plants uses, accrued over centuries.

Ecuador is one of few megadiverse countries in the world. It is also highly culturally diverse with more than 17 ethnic groups and languages spoken. Use of plant medicine is common in Ecuador, including among the mestizo, or racially mixed, population. This context and these databases provided an ideal repository of information for the international team.

hat the authors found was that introduced plants are selected much more often for medicine than would be predicted based on their abundance. Why was this the case? The availability of introduced plants was important in their selection, mostly as it relates to cultivation. Introduced plants also tended to treat illnesses that few native plants treat. Finally, introduced plants, on average, treated more conditions than native plants. It therefore appears that introduced plants are sometimes selected in ways that could supplant native plant use. The strong correlation between medicinal use of plants and cultivation suggests human-mediated environments such as home gardens and agroforests should be protected for the valuable human health resources they provide in Ecuador.

Endless Beauty And Romance by Missy Dress Fall 2017

Very honored to introduce you the 2017 Missy Dress Fall collection!

Dreamy details collide with exquisite couture finishing in my latest Missy Dress collection for Fall 2017. By using a unique combination of lace, crepe and tulle fabrics, this collection is full of endless romance. Fashion-forward elements like modern halter necklines and sexy side cutouts push this collection into trend-worthy status, while strong beadwork and beautiful silhouettes bring to mind classic bridal styles.

Linear lines, latticework, and bold bugle beading create Rococo-inspired patterns that lend themselves to modern and fresh wedding dress designs. Architectural beading creates contours and gives elements of subtle shimmer throughout the collection without feeling overdone or dated. By pairing beadwork with sheer cutouts and embroidered lace, my dresses are as luxe as they are versatile.

Inspired by runway and red carpet styles, cutouts are a fashion trend this season. Ranging from large lace cutouts to skinny slivers of skin, there is wide range of cutouts within my collection, providing something special for every bride.

From subtle sparkle to bold beadwork, sparkle makes an impact this season. Used to create dimension and texture, moonstone beading, Swarovski crystals, bugle beads and pearls are all used to give the gowns that hint of sophisticated sparkle.

Layers of lace, organza and French tulle come together to create soft texture that gives these wedding dresses a hint of drama. By creating a juxtaposition of fabrics, embellishments, and appliques, my collection feels very couture in nature.

The above is my unique design and some creative ideas.

What makes my collection stand out is its unique attention to detail, incredible finishes and amazing craftsmanship. As gorgeous as it is inspiring, brides will be able to find their dream dress in my new Fall 2017 collection, no matter what their personal style!

MASTER GARDENER: White plants add sparkle to garden

Cool white plants can have a pronounced effect on your garden, especially during the hot summer days. They can be used to soften brightly colored plantings or even be used exclusively, creating a moon garden. By planting solely white plants that reflect the moonlight you can have a garden to enjoy in the evening. There are white annuals, perennials and shrubs that can tolerate shade or sun so you can have a cool white look anywhere.

Listed below are some favorite cool white plants that can add sparkle to your garden:

Lily of the Valley: Perennial ground cover that works well in the shade. It has small white flowers and spreads quickly. It blooms in the spring and grows about 6 to 12 inches tall. Please note all parts of this plant are poisonous.

Shasta Daisy: Another perennial that prefers part sun to full sun, growing from 1 to 3 feet tall. This plant is drought tolerant and blooms in the summer and fall.

Annabelle Hydrangea: This hydrangea needs to be planted in part shade and prefers moist, well-drained soil. It can grow up to 5 feet tall and wide. Blooms start in the mid summer and are perfect for cuttings.

Iceberg Rose: This rose plant is very dependable and needs full sun with well-drained soil. It produces clusters of creamy-white blooms all summer and into the fall. The Iceberg Rose can grow to 5 feet tall and as wide as 3 feet.

Angel White Lilac: This lilac plant grows well in the South. The Angel White can grow up to 12 feet tall and 10 feet wide and needs full sun and well-drained soil. It can add fragrant flowers that are pure white with a recurred petal.

Clematis: Another perennial but in this case a vine that can grow from 3 to 20 feet. It needs part sun to sun exposure and can bloom depending on the variety from spring through the fall. Again this plant is poisonous.

There are many other plants that can be used to add the cool effect with white blooms such as Coneflowers "White Swan," Bleeding Hearts "Alba," "Alba" Four O'clock and Butterfly Bush "White Profusion."

If you decide to plant an all-white garden take into account the background. Also, research what the blooms look like after they fade; some look sickly brown. Take into account when the plant blooms so that you can include another plant that can hide a planting that is past its peak.

Give your tomato plants a fighting chance

 Tomatoes come from coastal regions in Chile and Peru – rocky places high in the mountains that are a far cry from our damp, mild climate. You can grow great tomatoes outside in the UK, but it's a gamble: they like long, hot, dry summers, not short, wet ones.

There are two types of tomatoes: cordon and bush. The other name for cordon tomatoes is "indeterminate", meaning they could grow on and on as long as the conditions allow, so these you have to prune. Do this by pinching out the side shoots that emerge between leaves and the main stem, and pinching out the main shoot when it has five to eight trusses – fruiting stems – of tomatoes. (Four or five trusses is best for cordon tomatoes grown in a pot.) Determinate, or bush, tomatoes can be left to do their own thing, no pruning necessary.

Our wet, humid conditions are manna for blight (Phytophthora infestans), a disease that starts with brown splodges on the edges of the leaves and then rapidly runs all the way down the stems and into the fruit, turning the whole plant to mush and leaving the tomatoes inedible. Blight is spread by spores that move on the wind, so outdoor-grown tomatoes are vulnerable, particularly bush tomatoes, whose dense leaf shape limits air circulation. If they get blight, they tend to go down very quickly.

One trick to beat blight is to plant early-fruiting varieties that have some resistance to the disease. Cordon tomatoes 'Mountain Magic' and 'Primabella' are both getting a lot of good press; I've always found the tiny fruit of 'Matt's Wild Cherry' reliable. Older varieties 'Lemon Drop' and stripy 'Tigerella' are said to have some blight resistance, too.

Whichever variety you choose, you need to cajole your plants into growing as quickly as possible. Right now, tomato plants should be flowering, so it's time to start feeding. I use homemade comfrey fertiliser and a small handful of seaweed pellets every four to six weeks. If you see roots appearing at the surface of the pot, top-dress with mulch or compost and keep watering.

Protected environments minimise the chance of blight spores reaching your plants. If you have a greenhouse, a sunny porch, a patio coldframe, polytunnel or a large enough cloche to protect your toms, use it. Spacing between plants is essential – at least 45cm apart outside if you can. Too close together and poor air circulation allows blight to run amok more quickly. If your tomatoes are in pots, put other plants (not potatoes, which also get blight) in between.

If one plant goes down, remove it immediately (never hold out in the hope that it will get better) and you may be able to save the others; or at least pick enough green fruit to make chutney. It's admittedly the booby prize for outdoor toms, but it's better than no prize at all.

Can Plants Hear?

Pseudoscientific claims that music helps plants grow have been made for decades, despite evidence that is shaky at best. Yet new research suggests some flora may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects.

In a recent study, Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues placed pea seedlings in pots shaped like an upside-down Y. One arm of each pot was placed in either a tray of water or a coiled plastic tube through which water flowed; the other arm had only soil. The roots grew toward the arm of the pipe with the fluid, regardless of whether it was easily accessible or hidden inside the tubing. "They just knew the water was there, even if the only thing to detect was the sound of it flowing inside the pipe," Gagliano says. Yet when the seedlings were given a choice between the water tube and some moistened soil, their roots favored the latter. Gagliano hypothesizes that these plants use sound waves to detect water at a distance but follow moisture gradients to home in on their target when it is closer.

The research, reported earlier this year in Oecologia, is not the first to suggest flora can detect and interpret such information. A 2014 study showed the rock cress Arabidopsis, a relative of cabbage, can distinguish between caterpillar chewing sounds and wind vibrations—the plant produced more chemical toxins after "hearing" a recording of feeding insects. "We tend to underestimate plants because their responses are usually less visible to us. But leaves turn out to be extremely sensitive vibration detectors," says lead study author Heidi Appel, an environmental scientist now at the University of Toledo.

Another hint that plants can hear comes from the phenomenon of "buzz pollination," in which a bee buzzing at a particular frequency has been shown to stimulate pollen release. Other experiments have found that sounds can lead to hormonal changes in plants, influence their oxygen uptake and change their growth rates. A study published earlier this year revealed that sound waves can even influence gene expression in Arabidopsis.

Michael Schöner, a biologist at University of Greifswald in Germany, who was not involved in the new research, believes that plants may have organs that can perceive noises. "Sound vibrations could trigger a response of the plant via mechanoreceptors—these could be very fine, hairy structures, anything that could work like a membrane," he says.

This research raises questions about whether acoustic pollution affects plants as well as animals, Gagliano observes: "Noise could block information channels between plants, for example, when they need to warn each other of insects." So next time you turn on a noisy leaf blower or a hedge trimmer in your garden, consider the lilies.

Me and my garden: ‘I get very emotional about plants’

As a boy, I’d go off into the moors just above my home in Bolton. I’d find interesting birds, and wander farther and farther afield each time. I was returning from a bird walk one day when I passed an allotment. I looked over the fence and this very different plant was growing in a patch of potatoes. I was moved to climb the fence and pick a bit – it was very sticky. I became known as the boy who found the Mexican tobacco, Nicotiana rustica: it was only the second recorded occurrence of this plant wild in the British Isles. I thought, if it’s that easy, what might I find if I really try?

When I was curator at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, I saw it as my big garden. Once I left the arboretum, I wanted my own collection; a garden under my nose. That way, if I was writing about plants I was growing and I needed to check – did it have a hairy leaf? Were the flowers really dark pink in bud? – I could just go outside and look.

I grew a rare Chinese magnolia, M. cylindrica, from seed sent to me from a friend I’d made in 1979 at the Shanghai Botanic Garden. He was a wonderful, shy, unpretentious gardener who was banished by the communists to some wilderness far from his home and had just been allowed back. The tree is in pride of place in my garden, where I can look down on it from my bedroom window. I had it for 15 years, and it still hadn’t flowered. I thought, if it doesn’t flower this spring, I’m going to give it away. It didn’t, so I rang a local arboretum to come and dig it up. The following spring it flowered for the first time. I thought, yes, I am going to keep you. At its peak in April, it produces several hundred blooms, and I still have it to remember my Chinese friend by.

I get very emotional about plants. Sometimes people ask where my energy comes from. Well, it should be obvious: my energy is green energy; it comes from plants, and plants get their energy from the sun. I am in my 80th year now. There’s no way I can pass away yet: there are too many plants that want to show me what they can do.

Cannabis plants found in Hednesford Road, Cannock

A MAN has been arrested after cannabis plants were discovered in Cannock.

The arrest of a motorist in Cannock resulted in the seizure of cannabis with an estimated street value of £60,000 in Pelsall on Wednesday, March 22 after plants were originally found in Hednesford Road.

Chief Inspector Geoff Knight, commander of Cannock Local Policing Team (LPT), said: "This is an excellent example of the proactive police work that continually takes place across the district.

"I hope this sends out a stark warning that if you come with the intention of selling drugs we will catch you. Illegal drugs and drugs activity in our district will not be tolerated."

Officers on routine patrol stopped a vehicle at 3.45pm on Wednesday (March 22) in Hednesford Road after noticing the driver was using a mobile phone.

When the vehicle stopped officers became suspicious due to the smell of cannabis and carried out a search. A quantity of cannabis was discovered.

The 38-year-old male driver was arrested on suspicion of possession of cannabis with intent to supply and taken into custody.

A subsequent search of an address in Lothians Road, Pelsall, resulted in the recovery of 51 cannabis plants, together with a large quantity of harvested cannabis with an estimated street value of £60,000.

A joint operation with the West Midlands cannabis destruction team resulted in the safe removal of the cannabis factory from the address.

The man arrested has since been bailed, pending further inquiries, to a date in July.

If you suspect drugs in your community report it to police on 101.

Grow your own jungle: easy exotic plants

As a botanist who grew up in tropical Singapore I have always been in love with exotic garden style, but not in the way you might expect. As a kid I was obsessed with creating an English country garden in sweltering rainforest conditions, begging my grandmother in Wales to mail me packets of sweetpea and nasturtium seeds so I could sow them in trays by air-conditioning vents and in chiller cabinets. To me these were impossibly exotic, otherworldly plants I only knew from storybooks.

Flash forward 30 years, however, and in the tiny Croydon patch I now have to play with I am forever experimenting with ornamental plants with massive jungly leaves and carnival-like flowers. You see, to me gardening is all about escapism, and playing with nature to create your very own fantasy world accessible from your front door.

Sadly, in the UK, tropical-effect gardening has become synonymous with huge expense and tricky to care for, often painfully slow-growing plants. Yet if you get your species choice right, you don’t have to splash out a small fortune on towering palms or tree ferns to get a flavour of faraway places. To prove it here are some of my favourite plants that provide massive impact in a single season from a modestly priced packet of seed or bulbs.

Eucalyptus are some of the fastest-growing trees on earth and can reach 6ft in a single season from a packet of seed. I love the frost-hardy cider gum (Eucalyptus gunnii) for its bright silver foliage, that can be kept at a manageable size by being cut right back to the base each spring, from where it produces its flushes of disc-shaped, powdery foliage.

For truly massive leaves, the foxglove tree (Paulownia tomentosa) can also be sown from seed and is extremely fast-growing. If whacked to the base each spring, it can throw out leaves the size of dustbin lids on branches 9ft high by the autumn. Other super quick, great impact foliage plants from seed include ricinus, echiums and solenostemon.

If it’s flowers you’re after, cannas, tree lilies and hedychiums will all put on a spectacular show year after year from an inexpensive packet of rhizomes – and from their very first summer, too. But to me the most quirky and cool of all the summer bulbs is the pineapple lily (Eucomis sp), a super easy to grow plant that in my experience can take all the cold and neglect you can give it. Eucomis bicolor has spectacular-sized cream and apple green flowers with a delicate purple lining, while Eucomis comosa ‘Sparkling Burgundy’, as the name suggests, kicks the shocking purple pigment into overdrive.

With plants like these, anyone can have a storybook jungle in their back yard for less than the price of a meal out.

Aberdeen council to fell hundreds of diseased trees

Hundreds of diseased or dead trees will be felled across Aberdeen this year, the council has announced.

The trees include a large number that have been infected with Dutch elm disease.

Aberdeen City Council said about 400 trees would be felled. They are mainly beside roads, but others are in parks, gardens and play areas.

The authority has about 100,000 trees and 400 hectares of woodland to look after in the city.

About 50 dead elm trees have been identified around Aberdeen with Kincorth, Summerhill, Rosehill, Cults, Culter, Stoneywood, and Bridge of Don particularly affected.

Tree epidemics

Aberdeen City Council's infrastructure convener, Neil Cooney, said: "We do not want to cut down trees but unfortunately we must, especially where there is Dutch elm disease to try and stop it from spreading.

"Our priority is to have safe and healthy trees for residents and visitors to enjoy in all parts of the city as part of our beautiful and vibrant green spaces.

"Removing dead or diseased trees means there is more room for the healthy trees to grow. Our arboricultural team will be undertaking this work over the next few months."

Dutch elm disease is one of the most serious tree diseases in the world. It has killed more than 60 million British elms in two epidemics and continues to spread.

It is caused by an aggressive fungus spread by elm bark beetles and infects all of Britain's elm species.

The elms die within three years of first signs of the disease, but may die within a season.