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Can laburnum poison other plants?
Rough gardener
Posts: 2
in Plants
Must be around 30 years ago I heard a gardening "expert" on the radio say that laburnum trees can kill hedging and plants beneath it. On hearing this we cut down a young tree on a newly purchased property. Now we keep bees, I have just been researching bee friendly trees and find laburnum is in this category.
Apart from evidence that the seeds of laburnum are poisonous; does anyone have experience of other plants interaction with this beautiful spring tree?
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Posts
If you have a tree in a hedgerow, the hedge underneath the tree canopy is thinner than the rest due to lack of light and nutients.
In the sticks near Peterborough
I had a lovely laburnum (that sadly blew down in a storm last year) and never found any problem with planting round it, though nearby conifers were a different matter.
Regarding bees however, on a visit to an NT garden last year we noticed hundreds of dead bees littering the ground beneath what looked like a lime tree. I thought bees loved lime blossom, so looked it up when we got home and found that some species of exotic limes are indeed toxic to bees. We debated whether the NT knew this and whether they should favour rare trees or threatened bees. Admittedly a difficult choice, as there might be some resistance to them changing historic gardens because some insects were incompatible with their trees.
Yes it is amazing how much wisdom you accrue as you get older! And how opinionated I was when I was young - how can we change this for other youngsters? Long live the internet so that information flows - unfortunately not all is valid there too..
Experts are not always what you might expect. Sometimes that's because of their over inflated self-importance. Sometimes, although it's supposedly in their line of expertise, that expertise is a very narrow focus and nothing beyond that focus counts. Sometimes jobs or even professorships are absolutely nothing to do with their actual expertise at all. And opinionated isn't just the province of the young.