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What is Sudden Oak Death and why should I be aware of it? Here is another good reason for buying locally grown plants... Reprinted for San Antonio Express News, January 22, 2005
Maybe you have heard of or read about a fungus called Phytophora ramorum. It is the destructive little pathogen responsible for a serious disease called Sudden Oak Death or SOD for short. To date, Sudden Oak Death is responsible for the demise of tens of thousands of natively growing oak trees along the coastal regions of northern California and southern Oregon. The disease was first discovered in 1985 on a species of tanoak (Lithocarpus densiflorus) growing in Mill Valley, Calif., just north of San Francisco. But it was only four years ago that plant pathologists from the University of California at Berkeley were able to isolate and identify it as Phytophthora ramorum - a shirttail cousin to that nasty fungus that caused the Irish potato famine in the mid-1800s. The horticultural red flag is that the pathogen P. ramorum has been located and identified on nursery stock in California, Oregon and Washinton. These host plants were scheduled for shipment this spring throughout the United States and Canada. On Jan. 10, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service implemented a federal order resticting shipment of certain plants. Agricultural officials call this"the most sweeping restrictions on the shipment of nursery plants ever undertaken in the United States." Because research is so new, and the disease to date has been isolated to a few particular species of oaks found only on the West Coast, plant pathologists are not sure exactly what other species of oaks are susceptible. |
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