Kansas planting guides
The site chooses the tree
Almost every planting that goes wrong in Kansas went wrong on the day it was chosen, and usually for an understandable reason — it grew fast, it flowered, it was what the lot had. Thirty years later the bill arrives as a lifted driveway, a limb through a roof, or a removal. The tree was rarely the mistake. The place was.
So this section works in the order the decision actually runs: what the ground can carry, how far it sits from everything else, what the soil is, what not to plant at all, and how to get it in without undoing the whole exercise in the first ten minutes.
Start here
Measure the space before you pick the species
Two questions settle most of it, and neither is about the tree. What is above the spot, and how much room is around it. Everything else — leaf colour, flowers, growth rate — is a preference you get to exercise only within the answer.
What this ground will carry
Medium tree
This is the workable middle for most Kansas lots. A medium tree set back twenty feet gives real shade over a roof without putting its trunk where the roots meet the footing.
Browsing by what a tree looks like instead? The species directory filters all 22 by size, origin, drought tolerance and fall colour
How far from what
Half the mature spread, measured from the trunk
That single rule generates most of the numbers below. A tree that finishes 50 feet across needs 25 feet between its trunk and anything it should not be touching — and roots run well past the branch tips, so underground services want more room than the canopy does.
- House foundation
- 30 ft, more where you have it
- This is the distance people regret most often, and always in the same direction.
- Driveway or walk
- 8 ft
- Large roots buttress as they thicken, and concrete is the thing that gives.
- Sewer lateral or septic field
- 40 ft
- Keep the whole root plate off a drain field. Repairs mean digging the tree out.
- Property line
- 20 ft
- A 70-foot tree overhanging a boundary is a conversation you will have eventually.
Under a power line: Never. Nothing in this class belongs under a wire at any distance from the pole.
Information about laws, city ordinances, insurance, and property responsibilities is general in nature and can change. Confirm details with your city, utility, insurer, or attorney before acting.
Difficult ground
Kansas soil is the constraint people plan for last
Clay that swings between waterlogged and brick-hard, a corner that never drains, and the compacted fill left behind by a builder are the three grounds most Kansas trees are asked to live in. None of them are hopeless, and all of them change what you should plant and how.
Heavy clay
Most of eastern Kansas and nearly all of the Wichita area. Clay holds water for days after rain and sheds it while dry, so roots swing between waterlogged and parched without ever meeting the steady moisture they want.
Plant slightly high rather than deep — the flare an inch or two above grade — and widen the hole rather than deepening it. Do not backfill with compost or potting mix: a rich pocket in dense clay becomes a bathtub, and roots circle inside it rather than leaving.
A spot that stays wet
A low corner, the bottom of a swale, or the ground beside a downspout that is still soft two days after rain. Roots need air, and permanently saturated soil has none — most trees drown slowly rather than dying outright.
Either fix the drainage first or plant something that expects it. Sycamore, catalpa and hackberry all handle ground that floods periodically. Do not solve it by mounding a foot of imported soil over the existing grade and planting into that.
Compacted builder's fill
The ground around any house built in the last few decades. Machines compact subsoil to a density roots cannot penetrate, and the topsoil is often four inches of screened material laid over it.
Break the compaction over an area several times the width of the root ball — the roots that matter will spend their first decade in the top foot of soil, not down the hole. This is the one situation where hiring the site assessment is usually cheaper than replacing the tree.
Handles ground that floods
Native and rides out a drought
For a windbreak the species matters less than the geometry: a belt set back from what it shelters by two to five times its own mature height, running across the prevailing winter wind rather than square to the property line. Eastern red cedar remains the workhorse across Kansas for exactly this.
What not to plant
Fast growth is a warning, not a feature
Wood laid down quickly is weak wood, and nearly every tree on this list was popular for the same reason: it filled a gap in five years. They are also the trees Kansas storm crews return to, and the ones now spreading into fencerows on their own.
Sold everywhere for decades on the strength of three weeks of spring flower. The branch unions are structurally weak and split out in Kansas wind, and it has escaped into fencerows across the state where its seedlings form thorny thickets.
Planted across the plains as a fast shelterbelt after the Dust Bowl and regretted since. Brittle wood, constant deadfall, and seedlings in every bed and gutter downwind.
Spreads by bird-dropped seed into every hedge and fence line, hybridises with the native red mulberry, and drops fruit that stains whatever is parked under it.
Fast, cheap, and the single most common source of storm limb failure in older Kansas neighbourhoods. Surface roots lift walks and shallow roots find sewer laterals.
The state tree, and magnificent in the right place — which is a river bottom or an open pasture, not a suburban lot. Enormous at maturity, brittle in wind, and the seed fluff is relentless.
Volunteers on any disturbed ground, grows fast into a weak-formed tree, and brings the boxelder bugs that overwinter on the sunny side of your house.
Good trees. Just not new ones.
These are not mistakes, and if you have a healthy one it is worth keeping and looking after. They are simply no longer worth starting, because something already established in Kansas will find them eventually.
- American Elm
- Dutch elm disease is why the elm-lined streets went. Disease-resistant cultivars such as 'Princeton' and 'Valley Forge' are a genuine option and worth asking a nursery for by name — a seedling-grown American elm is not.
- Green Ash
- Emerald ash borer is established across eastern Kansas and reaches untreated ash sooner or later. Keeping a mature ash on insecticide can be worth it; planting a new one to start that commitment is not.
- Austrian Pine
- Pine wilt kills Austrian and Scots pines across Kansas, often within a single season of the first symptoms, and there is no treatment once a tree is infected. Both have effectively stopped being plantable here.
Only 2 of the 22 species in the directory finish under 40 feet, and one of those is Bradford pear. If you are planting under a wire or into a narrow side yard, the honest position is that Kansas gives you very few good options at that size — which is a reason to measure carefully rather than to settle for the pear.
Getting it in the ground
Fall, and not as deep as you think
Roots keep working while soil stays above about 40°F, so a tree planted in October is growing underground through a Kansas winter while its canopy does nothing. That is months of establishment banked before it has to hold a full crown through July. Spring works, but the gap between workable soil and real heat is a few weeks in a good year, and summer planting is the one to turn down.
How deep it goes
This is the one
The root flare — where the trunk stops being a column and starts spreading into roots — sits at or slightly above the surrounding soil. On Kansas clay, an inch proud of grade is better than an inch under it, because the hole will settle a little either way.
Find the flare before you dig
Nursery stock is very often potted or balled too deep, so the top of the root ball is not the top of the roots. Scrape soil back until you find where the trunk widens into its first roots, and measure the hole from there.
Dig wide and shallow
Two to three times the width of the root ball, and no deeper than the ball itself measured to the flare. A hole dug deep and refilled settles, and a tree that settles is a tree planted too deep a year later.
Cut the circling roots
Container stock nearly always has roots that have wrapped the pot. Slice them vertically in three or four places and tease the ends outward. Roots left circling keep circling, and eventually strangle the trunk they are wrapped around.
Backfill with what came out
The soil from the hole, broken up, and nothing else. Amendments make the planting hole more comfortable than the ground around it, which is precisely the wrong incentive for a root system that needs to leave.
Stake only if it will not stand
Most trees do not need it. Where wind makes it necessary, stake low and loose so the stem can still move, and take the whole arrangement off within a year.
Watering and mulching a new tree are covered properly on the care hub, including how much a young tree actually needs and why the mulch must stay off the trunk. Watering and mulching a new tree
Replacing a tree that has come out
Replanting into the footprint of an old tree is the one planting job that is not mostly about the new tree. What is left underground decides whether it works.
A ground stump leaves a volume of chips and sawdust that will settle for a year and rob nitrogen while it rots. Planting straight into that mix gives a young tree loose, hungry ground that keeps subsiding underneath it. Either excavate the chips and backfill with soil, or plant a few feet to one side — usually the easier answer, and it avoids the old root plate entirely.
Where the tree came out because of disease, the ground matters more than the gap. Oak wilt and pine wilt travel through root grafts and beetles rather than living in the soil, so species choice for the replacement is the safeguard. A stump left whole is a different question again: it will feed decay fungi for years, and it is worth grinding before anything goes in near it.
Kansas Tree Guide is an independent educational resource. Nothing on this site replaces an on-site assessment by a qualified arborist or tree-care professional. Last reviewed August 2026.
Clearing the ground first?
Removal, stump grinding, and an on-site look at what a spot will actually support are the parts of this worth handing over. Kohnen's Tree Service does that work across Wichita and the surrounding communities, including health assessments on the tree you are thinking of replacing.
When a situation calls for professional help in the Wichita area, we refer readers to Kohnen's Tree Service, a working Kansas tree-care company whose field experience informs this site. That relationship is disclosed here and on our About page.