This Texas mountain laurel has a dead or dying trunk. (Contributed Photo)

Dear Neil: I planted a 3-in-1 pear tree three years ago at our place in South Texas. It’s only had one blossom on it so far, so it’s sluggish in that regard, but it’s also very yellow. I have tried adding iron, and I have sprayed it with fungicides and regular fruit tree sprays. Nothing has helped. What am I doing wrong?

Not to make you feel bad, but the first mistake was buying the multi-variety grafted tree. That’s a gimmick, even though you bought from a well-respected source. The different varieties aren’t always compatible. What you are seeing is iron deficiency, and that’s probably an issue with the tree’s rootstock and its inability to cope with alkaline soils. It can’t pull iron out of the soil and into the plant’s system. You can always identify iron deficiency by its place on the plant: most conspicuous on newest growth first. The older leaves farther down on the stems will remain dark green. The iron-deficient leaves will have yellowed blades with dark green veins, then eventually turn almost white, then brown. You have a match on all fronts. Most gardeners will try to apply iron either to the soil or as a foliar spray. Be careful: Iron can stain masonry and painted surfaces. Plus, it almost never works. You’re better off switching to other crops that won’t need the copious amounts of iron. If you still want to plant a pear, opt for the variety Orient, long known to be one of the most dependable for the Texas climate.

Dear Neil: We had a Bradford pear that suddenly, with no warning at all, fell over in a brisk windstorm last March. It could have fallen onto our house, into the neighbor’s fence, or over our landscape, so at least it chose the least damaging place to come down. I knew these trees don’t last long, but I didn’t realize they could fall without any warning at all. I thought your readers might want to know.

I appreciate your taking time to share your photos from last spring. My bet is that the tree is still gracing you with hundreds of root sprouts coming up all over your yard. Your joys will continue on for a while. Don’t let any of those develop. They will look harmless at first, but they’ll be Callery pears, the rootstock of Bradford pear. They have a much more open growth habit than Bradfords, but the two huge negatives of Callery pears are that they bear long thorns on their stems and they bear tiny little pears that birds find delicious. They will consume them and plant the seeds in the process. The plant will become invasive wherever there’s enough moisture for the seedlings to grow. There are several entire states that have banned Bradford and all other ornamental pears entirely because all of this happens.

Relative to your specific tree, notice in your one photo how many trunks are clustered together. They do not form good unions between one another and that’s why the trees decay and split. There is almost no way around it.

Dear Neil: We have several clusters of Texas mountain laurels. They have been doing quite well for some time, but one trunk of one just checked out hurriedly two weeks ago. Another in the back of the photo is showing darkened and curling leaves and is heading the same direction. What’s going on, and is there anything we can be doing?

I do not know for sure. Inspect the trunk of the infected stem closely right at the interface between healthy and browned tissues. That’s where you’ll find the source of your problem, whether there’s some type of injury, canker, or gall. The most common insect pest of Texas mountain laurel is the caterpillar of the Genista moth, but they strip the leaves entirely instead of turning them brown. Poorly draining soil in a year of heavy rainfall and also extreme cold would both impact the entire plant, not just an isolated trunk. Without being able to see the exact transition area on the trunk, I can’t get more specific.

Dear Neil: I recently read about moving away from nandinas as landscape shrubs because they can cause digestive problems with cedar waxwings that devour their berries, also because they are invasive plants. Is there an easy way to do this?

Digging them out by hand when the soils are quite moist and when temperatures are less than solar would be my suggestion.

But I want to step in and make a couple of comments. This “invasive plant” thing is a sensitive issue with me. I grew up as the son and nephew of two PhD botanists at Texas A&M. All they talked about all of my childhood were native, naturalized, and invasive plants. I was taught that a plant was invasive only if it was likely to grow undesirably beyond where it was planted. I mentioned earlier that Callery pears have become invasive in many states, even in Texas. Chinese tallows have, too, in the wetlands of South and Southeast Texas.

There are 10 or 12 varieties of nandinas in the everyday marketplace and many more in the uncommon market. Many of them never bear fruit and therefore are not going to bother the birds or become invasive, either. Those that do have berries can easily be trimmed in late winter to remove the fruit before it ripens. So, before we start throwing out big negatives on a great group of landscaping plants, let’s get all the facts and be as reasonable as we can be.

I’d rather deal with nandinas, for example, than the awful horseherb and inland sea oats I planted 20 years ago. They’re both all over my gardens. And maidengrass and all its seedlings that look like nutsedge, and Mexican feathergrass that comes up everywhere. Enough, already!