Our maple tree is big and old and its branches cover our whole front yard. It's our friend and keeps our house cool in the summer.

We have been noticing this spring that its leaves have some sort of black blight on them. If you stand on the ground and look up, you can see this blight all the way up into the top branches.

When you look at a leaf, the black blight seems to be making the leaves curl. It's as if something has taken away part of the leaf and the remainder has turned black. There are no holes in the leaf; rather the black part is just thinner than the rest of the leaf.

We see no bug or pests or anything that could be causing this. We are scared because we really really don't want to lose this big old grandfather tree.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what the cause could be and/or what we can do to get our tree healthy again?

The weather in our area has been normal and it doesn't seem as though it could be a factor.

Thanks.

Mr. Stuspot took a branch to the county extension agent today. They said they will send it in and get back to us.

I will be so sad if that big old tree has to go.

there is a disease that attacks maple trees.

on the street where i grew up, everyone had a maple tree in the front yard...it looked so nice when you looked up the block with all the same trees lining the street!

that blight started hitting them tho and one by one they had to be taken down...that was back when i was a kid (long time ago ) there are only 3 left that didn't get the blight...

when our tree was cut down, the whole inside of the trunk was rotted away...i was too young at the time to remember if the leaves were as you described...

hopefully it's something that would be treatable (and not this blight thing) and you won't have to lose the tree!!

Try looking here:
Tree Help

Good News!! The extension guy called yeseterday and told us that what our maple tree has is anthraxnos disease (sounds scary, huh?) and that it is favored by cool, wet weather. He said that when it warms up the disease will go away!!



I was so worried about losing our big tree. Whew.

Oh, and Pianolady, thanks! I did look there before I posted here but I couldn't find anything there that really resembled our issue.

i'm glad it's nothing too serious!

someone else posted a similar question and i ended up doing some research.

anthracnose