Sweetgum

Spiky golf-ball-sized woody fruits littering the ground beneath the tree from fall through winter, rolling underfoot on hard surfaces and hiding in the grass.

Rake, blow, or roll up the fruit repeatedly where it lands on used areas; fruit-inhibiting growth-regulator sprays exist but give inconsistent results and need professional application. Fruitless 'Rotundiloba' is the reliable long-term fix.

Site the tree well away from walkways, patios, driveways, lawns, and play areas - a naturalized or open area where fruit can simply lie is ideal; or plant the fruitless cultivar 'Rotundiloba' to avoid the problem entirely.

The defining drawback of sweetgum: mature trees drop hundreds of hard, woody, spiky 'gumball' fruits over a long season. They're painful to step on, too hard for most mowers, difficult to rake, and a real tripping and ankle-turning hazard on paths, patios, driveways, and lawns.

Sweetgum prefers slightly acidic ground and shows chlorosis and steady decline on limey soils. On an alkaline site, choose a more pH-tolerant tree instead.

Yellow leaves with a distinct network of green veins, worst on the NEWEST growth at the shoot tips - that vein pattern is what separates it from a nitrogen shortage, which yellows the oldest leaves uniformly. Whole plants going progressively paler over a season rather than suddenly. Brown scorched leaf margins and shoot-tip dieback in advanced cases. Symptoms concentrated on the side of a plant nearest a foundation, wall, path, driveway, or a stretch of limed lawn. One plant affected while a neighbor that does not need acid soil looks perfect.

Correct the soil, and use iron only to buy time. Chelated iron sprayed on the leaves or drenched into the root zone greens a plant up within a week or two, but it wears off in a season and has to be repeated indefinitely - it fixes nothing. The real fix is lowering pH with elemental sulfur applied to the surface and watered in, retesting each season until you are in range, then holding it there with acidic mulch and acid fertilizer. Expect one to two years; there is no fast route. Note that other shortages look identical - manganese deficiency produces the same yellow-with-green-veins pattern on some plants - so a plant that does not green up from iron should be tested rather than dosed again. Where the pH is high because of nearby concrete or genuinely calcareous subsoil, the plant is in the wrong place, and moving it into a properly built acidic bed or container will succeed where years of amendment will not.

Test the soil pH before you plant, not after, and match the plant to the ground - an acid-loving plant in limy soil will never be truly healthy however it is fed. Where the pH is too high, acidify with elemental sulfur worked in the season BEFORE planting, since sulfur takes months of soil biology to work and cannot be rushed, and retest before you commit plants. On genuinely alkaline ground the honest answer is often a raised bed of acidic mix, or a container, rather than fighting the native soil forever. Keep an acidic organic mulch topped up - pine bark, pine straw, sawdust - and site acid-lovers away from concrete foundations and mortared walls, which leach lime for decades. Never apply lime, wood ash or mushroom compost where the roots reach, use acid-forming fertilizers such as ammonium sulfate, and improve drainage, because cold waterlogged soil hurts uptake even at the right pH.

Not an infection but a nutrient lockout caused by soil chemistry. Iron is abundant in almost every soil, but as pH rises it converts to forms roots cannot take up, so a plant that needs acid ground slowly starves for iron while standing in soil full of it. The symptom is unmistakable: new leaves go pale yellow or cream while the veins stay green, giving a fine green net over a yellow leaf. It shows first and worst on the newest growth, because iron does not move around inside a plant to be recycled. It does not spread between plants, does not respond to fungicides, and does not resolve on its own - left uncorrected the plant grows less each year, leaves get smaller and paler, shoot tips die back, crops fall away, and it eventually dies. Worst near concrete, mortar, paths and limed ground, and in cold, wet, compacted soil.