Taking Another Look

In Fall, From the Field, Plant Health Care, Spring, Summer, Winter by Forest Keeper3 Comments

I’ve been to this particular property quite a few times, and  looked at the trees very carefully. We’ve done work for this client, removing unwanted and dangerous trees and pruning many of the large shade trees on his property.  Just recently, however, we found something that we had never seen before. I was doing some pruning for these folks when one of the guys went over into the neighbors yard to get a small branch that fell on their side, when he proclaimed, “OH MY GOODNESS! Look at that thing! That’s gonna go over any day!”

What!? We all went over into the neighbors yard and looked up. WOW! that tree really is dangerous! We had not seen the flaw in this tree in spite of being on this property many times, simply because we had never looked at things from the neighbors side of the fence.

this tree need to be removed

Look at the decay in this tree trunk. This escaped us since it was on the back side of the tree and we never looked at it from the neighbors property

As you can see from this perspective this tree has a serious chance of failure and needs to be addressed.

Tree needs to be removed

Look how much weight is above that decayed portion of the trunk! the fact that this tree has not toppled down onto the neighbors deck with all of the winter weather we've had, is very lucky.

Looking from our clients side of things, this tree looks quite healthy, and with all of the other work that we’ve done here, we never saw the need to touch this tree. Looking again however, this tree needs to be cut down.

It just goes to show how stepping outside of our normal boundaries from time to time will help us see things, sometimes very important things, that we’ve been missing all along.

Comments

  1. Trees are amazing — they will leaf out and look stately and look like a pillar of the landscape even when only a fraction of the trunk is holding it up and moving any nutrients. It’s a good thing someone took a “new” look at that tree and the leaves were down so you cold see it!

  2. Hopefully it will get cut down in time! Might make for a good habitat tree if you can leave the trunk below the decay.

    1. Author

      Yeah I was thinking about that also, but it’s yet to be seen if our client will go for it (though it will be suggested). Finding the balance between the local ecology and the homeowners needs is always a good challenge. I see that educating people on things like this is an important part of our service.

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