What a would a sociopath use to kill a tree

No sociopath here folks, here is the deal:

When I was a young teen my folks had me work one summer with a lunituc landscaper. I cut grass in a nut shell. One day he told me that one of the clients was weeks behind on paying him and if he didn’t collect the money he was going to put________around the roots of his prize maple tree. He said that it would kill the tree and anything else that he ever tried to plant there.

I am working on a short story about this guy (there is much more) but can’t remember what it was. It could have been antifreeze or something like that. It was something that would be around the house.

I was about 13 or 14 and I had never seen that kind of anger.

Anyone know what it might have been? Is there one common thing that a Psycho-arborists might use?

Thanks and sorry about the downer post.
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Salt? That was reportedly used by the Romans against Carthage in the Punic war to render fields infertile and destroy the country.

Related story: I had a panicked student call me up one day because she found “some bizzare ring of death!” in her back yard. She’d done a fertility rite out there previously, and was just horrified that instead of bringing life, it had killed her grass. She started sobbing about evil and the devil’s work before I figured out what she was going on about - she had cast a Wiccan circle outdoors and used salt. The salt, of course, killed her grass. I told her that the best representation of Earth in outdoor workings is, you know, EARTH! Like dirt or sand or rocks, which are laying all over the place! Then I recommended she dig a fire pit in her “dead” circle and grow a crop of hippies.

Rock salt kills most plants, but you’d have to be dedicated and sneaky to put enough salt in the ground to kill a tree. You could dissolve rock salt into water until you had a super-saturated solution, and then pour that over the roots… but again, lots of work, and tough to explain if you get caught. There are probably lots of nastier chemicals that would work, too.

Almost ten years ago, someone poisoned a historic tree in Austin, Texas called the Treaty Oak. According to Wikipedia, he used an herbicide called Velpar.

But it’s very very easy to kill a tree simply by ringing it. Much easier and more certain than poison.

Anti-freeze will certanly kill grass. I don’t know about any larger flora.
I’ve used it to kill weeds on many occasions. Cheap and effective.
I made sure not to leave any puddles around because of stray cats. They like it and it’s very poisonous to them.

With a tiny lawn mower?

No, a very big nut shell.

Copper nails.

Drive 9 or 10 in, around the base.

It sounds like it could have been something like this, maybe it was something that he kept in his shed to work with.

Thanks!
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Yea that would not have been it, I would think that I would have remembered if it was salt.

Wouldn’t copper sulfate do it?

It was some kind of Chem warfare that he had in mind.

My parents were so smug that they had found me a summer job, This guy was a junkie, a drunk and god knows what else.

I remember running stop signs with a huge trailer in tow, when he did hit the breaks bottles of booze would roll out from under the front seat of the work truck.

One time a new kid who was told to trim some bushes and cut down weeds, cut a grape vine that had been in the family for 50 or 60 years.

This owner guy just loaded us kids into his truck and said that he needed to get a fix. We sat in the truck in front of a house for an hour or so while he was inside shooting up heroin. I didn’t know exactly what was going on at the time but we had a pretty good idea.

But I had a summer job that year and that was what counted!

I throw a party every year where it is absolutely essential to not run out of beer (especially at 3 in the morning). So, I always get way too much. Several years the turnout has not been so great or consumption has been insufficient so I’ve actually had to dump out over a keg of beer. I’m pretty sure this killed a very nice palm tree in my yard.

Copious deposits of dog pee.

This is hilarious. I really hope you do write the story, and then share it with us!

I think you’re mistaken here. Beer should not kill a tree. Beer is mostly water, with a bit of fermented grain in it. If anything, that should be nice fertilizer for the tree.

Nor would it drown a tree. Even a full large keg would only be 16 gallons, spread out over the footprint of a tree’s roots that is nothing significant. (That’s only about 3 pails full; when watering a young tree I’ve often had to carry more than 3 pails of water.)

So unless there is something special about palm trees (we don’t have them up here in Minnesota), this keg was unlikely to have caused the death of your tree.

Did many of your male guests at this party tire of waiting for the bathroom, and use this convenient tree in your backyard? That may have had some effect.

I’m pretty sure copper sulfate is the answer.

Yea, if you are any good at writing short stories, this is totally short story territory.

FWIW, the Velpar did not kill the tree (although it received a good deal of professional attention for many years and most of the tree was killed) and I’m not sure it would have prevented anything from growing there later. And it was in 1989, which is almost 20 years ago.

At the risk of looking like an idiot for missing a joke, what do you mean by “ringing” a tree?