ugh...trying again:

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{{gwi:1206279}}

{{gwi:10494}} Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!

Woot!! Success! But why is the picture so tiny? Bah...

The reason it's so small is that it's a thumbnail. If you click on it, you get the full sized picture.

The roots are still alive--you can see new growth coming from them. Unfortunately, there's no way to tell whether the root stock is the same as the tree. It's fairly unlikely that they're the same because the usual practice is to graft the desired tree onto a less desired rootstock to quickly create many trees. So letting one of the suckers grow will probably not produce the desired crabapple tree.

If you're sure the tree is dead, there's not much you can do at this point. I would take some of the bark and maybe part of the trunk to an extension office and see if they can figure out what happened.

Before doing that, you might want to try calling Larry Sagers on the Greenhouse show at KSL radio. It runs from 8-11 AM on Saturdays. I always listen to the podcasts after the fact. He's usually very good at figuring out over the phone what went wrong (he may ask you more questions and you may need to look at the tree closely while he's asking.

greenhouse.ksl.com has the phone numbers.

Hey Dianne, If the upper tree is still good, then there are two things you should do. First, dig down at the base of the tree and remove the sprout that is coming from the root of your tree. It's got to go.
The second is to leave the bark alone but this fall, get some cheap white latex paint and apply it to the sunburnt area. You could also wrap the trunk with fabric or put a wood board against the trunk. The UV rays are very strong here and you just want to protect against "sunburn".

For future reference, one extreme approach that can be taken if a tree is girdled and you are comfortable with grafting (this must be done before the tree dies above the spot that girdled).

Get some living small branches (suckers will work). At intervals around the trunk, graft the bottom of part of a branch to the tree below the girdled spot, then graft the top above the girdled spot. The more of these you can use, the better your chances. Eventually, the tree grows around them, but they basically become the conduit for nutrients and water.

Thanks. I did realize you could click on the picture to see it bigger, but I wanted it that bigger size right here on this page. I thought the last image hosting site I used did that - maybe it was Photobucket.

Nativewines - thanks for your comments. I'll get the sucker out ASAP and am planning on wrapping it this fall. Any idea how many years I should continue to wrap? The trunk is currently about two inches in diameter at the base, if that matters.

bpgreen - The tree is very much alive! (and not girdled, either.) Just put on a nice show of flowers and looks like it's grown three feet since we put it in a couple of years ago. I've never listened to Larry Sagers' show, but I've read a lot of his articles at the USU extension's website. I'll have to check out the radio show.

Dianne