Last week I helped a friend cut off the burlap around the top of the soil from where someone (poorly!) planted a parkway tree with the rope and burlap still intact. Anything besides the dirt rootball should be removed when planting a tree; even some of the dirt from the top of the rootball may need to be carefully brushed off to reveal the rootflare.
So many trees are being planted, but they're being done hastily and it's unfortunate because they will never reach a mature state of full growth.
GOOD examples of established root flares in mature trees that were planted CORRECTLY:
This tree, below, looks somewhat girdled, but still shows a flare.
The tree below does NOT!!! have good rootflare, it looks more like a telephone pole and grass is growing too close to the trunk. (More about this here from Davey Tree Care: http://blog.davey.com/2011/06/in-too-deep/)
A few posts down on July 8th I posted a photo of a recently-planted (about 5 years or younger) tree which was likely planted too deep, with burlap wrapped around its roots and now has grass growing right up around the trunk. The tree looks "bleached" at the based and is coming out of the ground like a telephone pole instead of having flaring roots like legs or feet. It's not happy and is rotting at its base! The photos above show some better examples of rootflare, though a couple of them look like they have some root girdling, which means the roots are bound right around the base of the tree instead of growing outward like a wine glass base.
Also, we took a quick 20-mile ride this weekend on the Des Plaines River Trail south! This weekend was also my first time planting arbor vitae for/with a friend! Lots of digging.
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