Near where we garden there are some English elm trees (ulmus something), that send out long roots which send up more trees. The trees have all the time in the world, and they are getting ahead of us.
So I am thinking of treating them the way you treat running bamboo which does the same thing. (With bamboo, you put a 6-8" root barricade just under the surface, tilted like this: / with the bamboo on the left of the / and the protected area on the right. The roots reach the / and are deflected upwards, and you come along a few times a year and snip them at the top of the / and pull out the ends on the right-hand side. Relatively, this is easy maintenance.)
But I’ve put in a fair amount of time calling nurseries, hardware stores, and organizations like the city Master Gardener and Our City Forest, and they pretty much act as if they have never heard of this except for bamboo, and the barrier can’t be found.
So the question is, is this a good solution? are there other solutions?
And, what material should the barrier be? Probably heavy plastic, but what kind of plastic holds up under the soil? Or metal flashing? We want to get about 200’ of it, so that rules out the only material I found, which was 18" panels at $4.50 each.