i would start by contacting your LOCAL COUNTY extension office.. and asking the local peeps ...

is that the driveway back int eh pic.. and what is the door frame doing in the fencing... just curious...

ken

I don't know. B locusts are always under attack from something, but rarely in my experience die outright like that. Maybe take a sample dead branch to a horticultural office. Have they been girdled somewhere near the base by something?

I don't have experience with black locust and it isn't very common in my area but I have seen it on the list of trees that are highly susceptible to verticillium wilt. Do you have any pictures that are closer? Pictures of the trunks and branches close up? Base of the trees and ground around them?

it appears that replies cant be seen except by the person replying.. and i suspect it is due to you including the FAQ forum.. that historically caused problems..

ken

Category has been corrected, so you should now see comments as expected.

Sorry I only chose the tree forum when I made the post so no clue how the FAQ forum got included. Maybe it was already checked and I didn't notice.

@ken_adrian Adrian MI cold Z5 No that is not the driveway in the pic. It is the road. The door is to our garden. This is what the whole area looked like 6 1/2 years ago. The black road you see in the original post pic is the gray road in this pic.

@bengz6westmd I do not know what girdled means. These trees just pop up on their own. We have had them pop up in many areas and the same thing happens to all of them. We have tulip populars pop up all over as well and they are all fine. Blackberry is all over the place as well and that grows like crazy. Maples and Oaks are fine. We cut a dead BL down that was near those current dead ones(they were still alive and green then) and I didn't see anything unusual on the ground. Anything around the trees just comes up on its own. We had 2 other BL near the front of the house in a completely different area that suffered the same fate.

@mntreegrower Sorry I don't have other pictures and i am away from home until next week.

One can use a search engine for the meaning of a word, no? Girdled means something has damaged the trunk all around its circumference, killing it. mntreegrower's mention of verticillium wilt may be the cause as it can kill entire trees like that.

Hi vinmarks. My name is Ryan Franke and I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota studying disease in black locust, and using fungal pathogens to control it's growth. Believe it or not, black locust is an invasive tree up here in the midwest states that is replacing native trees and so we are collecting fungi that could potentially be used to control its growth where it is invasive. I'm very interested in your dying black locust trees. Sounds like it could be wilt pathogen.

Would you be open to shipping us a cut section sample from a tree that died recently to our lab in Minnesota for diagnostics? We can send you a shipping label, so it would be free of charge to you!

If you're interested, you can message me here or send me an email at frank792@umn.edu.

If you'd like to learn more about our research project, you can find out more here: https://mitppc.umn.edu/research/research-projects/biological-control-black-locust-using-fungi