Falling into Spring

On our daily walk, we came across a neighbor slowly dismantling a large tree limb with a chain saw. Sometime overnight, a large limb split from the top of his large Elm tree and landed in the front yard. Luckily, it did not hit his house and narrowly avoided a car parked on the street.

Many of the older trees in this neighborhood, ours included have suffered some form of neglect over the years. I would guess that a trained arborist has never looked at most of them. The quality of tree maintenance companies vary widely and I seen more examples of bad pruning than I care to think about. We have spent the last 8 years trying to bring all our trees back into some healthy form, after having been neglected for many years. Even so, there is only so much you can do with an older tree.

In talking with the neighbor, it seems another branch, lower down and even larger, was taken off this tree a year or so ago. It had offered some warning that it was about to fail, though, drooping slowly and showing cracks along its length, and he was able to remove it before it failed completely.

A quick inspection of the limb, and the scar on the trunk, didn't seem to show any major rot or disease. The Elms started adding their leaves only about a week ago, so I wonder if the added weight was a contributing factor. We haven't had any high winds for about 2 weeks, but it is possible that it was damaged back then and only no completely failed.

This is a timely reminder to have your larger trees inspected on a regular basis and keep them pruned in a manner that keeps them healthy and stable. You don't want a limb this large, or worse yet, an entire tree, landing on your house or car.

I also found one oddity on the fallen limb. There was one section where a lower limb had been pruned and another sprout formed. THis sprout somehow merged with another branch slightly higher on the tree. This created a large rectangle of out of the 2 limbs and the main limb. I am not sure how they could have joined up so well. Any ideas from the readers?

You can see a few pictures of the tree and limb by clicking on the photo above.