We planted this 35-gallon live oak back in March 2019. It's been doing extremely well despite the couple of harsh winters and the back-to-back droughts and still looks very healthy. I was looking at it this weekend and noticed the attached - should we be concerned? Any action items recommended?


Pretty large opening on the trunk towards the bottom of the photos and above a lot of holes (woodpecker?).

Live Oaks can shed bark due to weather stress. Could be other things (like an animal). Sunscald causes a similar deal to happen. Looks to be healing well and the leaves look good in the picture. Probably not much to do outside of nitrogen and water. Make sure you don't have turf grass up against the tree. Will put less stress on it.

Appreciate the feedback and agreed - all other signs show this tree as happy and healthy.

We did have mulch around it for the first couple of years but it's just been overtaken by the native grasses in about the past year. I have not touched it in terms of trimming some of the lower branches until this past week where it was really needed as I wanted to let it do its thing.

We planted another 35-gal live oak about 100 yards away from this one at the exact same time. It ended up getting the same holes poked all over it in about Year 2 along with a buck rubbing one side of the trunk down pretty good. I will say that it has also continued to thrive although not as much as the one in my original photos.