Why does a stump keep sending up sprouts after the tree is cut?
A hardwood stump is still alive below the cut. The roots hold the sugar the tree stored over years, and the bark at the base and on the roots carries buds that sat dormant while the crown was in charge. Take the crown away and those buds get the signal and the stored energy at the same time. That is why the ring of whips appears, and why stump grinding in Hot Springs is usually how the owner ends it.
The buds live in the bark, mostly around the root collar, the flared wood where the trunk meets the ground. The center of the stump is heartwood and has nothing to sprout from. So the whips come up in a circle at the bark line, and they come up fast. A sprout has a full-size root system feeding it from the first day, and no seedling in the yard can keep up with it.
Which Hot Springs trees come back from the stump, and which do not?
It depends on the species, and in Garland County it mostly divides along the line between the pines and everything else. The US Forest Service keeps a silvics manual, a species-by-species account of how each tree grows and regrows, and it sorts most of the yard trees here plainly.
- Sweetgum comes back hard. In the Georgia Piedmont stands its foresters studied, most of the young, fast-growing sweetgum turned out to be sprouts off old roots rather than seedlings.
- Crape myrtle comes back from the soil line if the roots are alive, as the University of Arkansas extension service’s crape myrtle answers note. Some varieties sucker every year whether they are cut or not.
- Oaks sprout well when young and less as they age. Small white oaks sprout “prolifically and vigorously” when cut, and the odds fall steadily as the trunk gets bigger, until the largest stumps rarely sprout at all. A big old post oak stump usually sits there and rots.
- Hickories stump-sprout after cutting too.
- Loblolly pine does not. Past the seedling stage a cut loblolly produces no basal sprouts and no root sprouts.
Shortleaf, the other native pine on these hillsides, is the odd one. Young shortleaf pines sprout vigorously at the root collar when the top is killed, from buds on a crook the seedling forms near the ground, and the silvics puts the limit at trees up to about six to eight inches across. A grown shortleaf cut down for a house or a drive leaves a stump as dead as a loblolly’s.
Suckers at the base of a crape myrtle that is still standing are a different question, covered in how to prune a crape myrtle in Hot Springs.
Why are sprouts coming up in the lawn feet away from the stump?
Those are root suckers, and they come from the roots, not the stump. Sweetgum is the usual culprit. Its lateral roots carry suppressed buds, and disturbance like a cut is what releases them. The Forest Service’s sweetgum silvics reports 40 or more stems coming up on the root system of a single parent tree.
The tell is the pattern. Stump sprouts crowd the stump in a ring. Root suckers come up in a loose line or a scatter across the grass, often along the path a big root takes toward a bed or a downspout, sometimes through the gravel at the edge of a drive. Pull one up and a length of root comes with it. They mow like grass if the mower gets them every week, and they turn into a thicket by August if it does not.
Does cutting the sprouts back ever make them stop?
Eventually, and slowly. Every flush of sprouts is paid for out of what the roots have stored, and every time the sprouts come off before their leaves have repaid it, the account gets smaller.
It only works if it is steady. Let the sprouts leaf out for most of a busy summer and they put back much of what the last few cuts took. Cutting every time they show, all season, wears a stump down over a few years. Cutting when you get around to it keeps the stump fed.
Does grinding stop a stump from sprouting?
For stump sprouts, yes. The ring of whips grows from buds in the bark of the root collar, and once the grinder has turned the collar to chips there is no bark left at the old trunk to sprout from.
Root suckers can still come. The lateral roots stay in the ground after a grind, and a sweetgum’s roots may push up a scattering of suckers across the lawn for a while after the stump is gone. Those have no stump feeding them anymore, so they get weaker with each mowing and fade out. How far down the machine goes is set on the estimate, and the standard depth for stump removal in Garland County is covered on the grinding page.
What about stump killer from the hardware store?
Any herbicide goes on a stump exactly as its label says. Which product fits which tree, and when in the year it works, changes with the species and the season, and the Garland County office of the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service in Hot Springs is the place to get current guidance before buying anything.
Near the water on Lake Hamilton or Lake Catherine, check with Entergy’s lake management program before anything goes on a stump at the shoreline.
Can a sprout from the old stump be grown into a new tree?
For an oak or a sweetgum in a yard, rarely one worth keeping. The Forest Service’s white oak silvics draws the line by where the sprout starts. A low sprout off a small stump can make a tree about as good as one grown from seed, while sprouts that come out high on the stump are likely to carry heartwood decay.
Most yard stumps come from trees that were big when they came down, and the sprouts that do come are anchored in wood that has already begun to rot. As they thicken they tend to become a clump of stems joined over that soft wood, and a clump like that splits apart in an ice storm years later.
Crape myrtle is the exception. It grows as a clump anyway, and the University of Arkansas extension service’s advice for a crape whose top has died back to live roots is to keep one to three of the sprouts from the soil line and let them regrow the plant.
For a shade tree, plant a new one a few feet off the old spot, or have the stump ground deep enough to put the new tree where the old one stood. An average stump runs $110 to $300 to grind, extra depth for replanting is its own line, and what grinding an average stump costs sits with the rest of the Garland County ranges.