just a way for the grower to keep track of the cultivar ...

your seller ought to be able to ask the grower what the system is ...

unless you have a growers tag on it.. and can track them down yourself ...

one has to imagine.. its hard to sell a specific color flower.. when the tree is dug when the tree isnt blooming ...

my best theory ...

ken

Many growers use this method of indicating which side was facing south.

i have seen the marks.. circle the trunk ... bands ...

sara implies vertical lines..

your words fail .. which is it???

never conceptualized facing a tree it was growing ... heard of it.. just never minded it.. i face them.. they way they look best.. from whatever direction i will view it from ... and back in the day.. that would have been from the chair next to the beer cooler... lol ...

ken

Ken it's not so much that you need to make it face that way as it is useful to know which way it was facing. If you turn it around you may need to protect the bark for a bit. Many of the trees that I get from Oregon are so marked - with an orange or yellow splotch, and the wholesaler told me that it was to mark the south side of the tree.

This post was edited by formandfoliage on Fri, Aug 8, 14 at 16:37

It is just two lines, they do not encircle the tree trunk. Easy to keep track of a Hawthorn that we have had on "layaway" at the nursery (guess you can't call it that, as it was paid for at the time, just held for us...nice local nursery) since this spring when we first saw it bloom. We were waiting to finish leveling our yard, which got delayed a couple of times, due to my husband's deployment. Either way, I will call the nursery tomorrow and ask. I am definitely not new to gardening (grew up on a crop farm and extended family owned a successful nursery-closed when they passed, and I helped and learned a lot there). I have not, however, ever encountered any tree marking, unless you count big orange circles they put on trees destined to be felled.

At my work we paint the liners before we line them out, so that we can tell similar varieties apart. It helps before planting so they don't get mixed up, it helps when they're in the field so that you don't have to go looking for a planting stake, and it helps after they are dug so that they don't get mixed up. For us, at least, it has nothing to do with which way they were facing in the field.