Can this tree be saved?

justaguy93

Hello everyone, I'm new here and looking for some tree related advice. I have an Ash tree in my back yard, maybe 15" in diameter or so, that originally split three ways at the top of the trunk probably 6' off of the ground or so. A couple of years ago a windstorm came through and split one of the branches off of the tree and as it came off it striped a good portion of the trunk off. A few months later the second mail branch split off as well doing the same. Despite this the third and main branching of the trunk remains, the leaves come in fine and the bark is slowly regrowing. I've been waiting it out to see if the tree can possibly recover before brining it down but now I'm going to be doing some building on my lot and I'm thinking if the tree is doomed it'll be a lot safer to bring it down now vs later. I'd say the trunk is split to about 60% of it's original thickness and has maybe 60% of the bark remaining for a good 2-3' or so. Despite all of this the tree still looks healthy and has lasted two winters in this shape.

I hate to bring it down but I just don't know enough about trees to know if it can possibly recover from this type of damage. Could anyone offer any advice?

newguy18

first of all welcome,second can you take pics of the wounds?Those would be useful.I would also recomend you hire a certified arborist[perferably isa certified] to do a risk assessment of your tree.Some trees can be saved even after severe storm damage.

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old schooler

justaguy93

Thanks for the reply, I can post some photos tonight that show the extent of the damage and I'll have a look around to see what sort of local professionals are available.

justaguy93

Okay here are a couple of pictures of the first split and some current pictures showing the recovery, or lack thereof.

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treeseer

Tree stem looks like it's trashed. Coppice it. Cut it to the ground and train the sprouts to a single trunk or clump form, your choice.

TrevMcRev

Pretty bad damage there. It's future doesnt look bright, but you want its shade

If with your planned building works it means it will be more difficult to remove once complete definately remove it now.

Replant after building works are complete or protect the area around the new tree with a fence if you want to plant earlier to get some growing time under its belt if the project will take some time to complete.

TrevMcRev

Oh yeah and if treeseer says its trashed, its trashed.

Eric Frei

What a poor specimen to start with. How tight were those inclusions? Flamin shockers.

Justaguy93

I could use those pics on my website, dont mind if I borrow them I hope, gotta start showing people what to take back to the nurseries or prune when younger.

Co-dominant Stems

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justaguy93

Feel free to use the pictures, especially if they'll help some other homeowners from making the same mistakes as the original owners of our property did. Sad thing is we also have a silver maple, very large, where the trunk splits almost down to the ground. That one could cause some serious damage if it fell, fortunately the split runs parallel to the house.

Thanks everyone for the advice, I really appreciate it! It'll be sad to cut it down but if we wait it'll be almost impossible to do without causing damage to something else so I guess it's time.

TrevMcRev

Post up some pics of the Silver Maple's split/join.

We can have a look, but may be worth your while getting a consulting arborist in to inspect it to be sure. There are things that can be done to trees like this to help prevent the failure occurring.

justaguy93

Okay here is the Silver Maple in question.

http://bass.redirectme.net/webimages/tree/DSC_1103.JPG

You can see the trunk remains two separate parts all the way down.

Sean Freeman

Justaguy, we can offer you general advice, and you may have noticed we like to discuss/argue matters to death at times here (which is a good thing i think), but with regards the specifics of your tree it really is impossible without being there to properly make an assessment.

From the pic, the tree is slightly buried in addition to having a very significant structural defect in both stems. Being buried is NOT good. It could be possible to bolt the two stems together, with perhaps a dynamic cabling system above, but there are a great many contributing factors to take into consideration before going down that track...potential targets being the main one!

I would be searching you local area for a Certified Arborist at the very least, check their credentials check how much experience with managing such trees they have...references, etc...
You could try here Trees Are Good - Find a Tree Care Service
put in your location details and see who comes up.

TrevMcRev

Justaguy, Seans advice is spot on (whats new!)

Only other thing is that its not always just about targets. Even if there is nothing within stiking distance of the tree, bracing and cabling can help to prevent a failure that would write off the rest of the tree.

Tree Preservation is also as good a use for these techniques as Hazard Prevention.

Call in a recommended arborist and dont be afraid to pay a fee for unbiased advice.

A $100 consultation might save you an unecessary $1000 tree removal bill.

TreeSpecialist

Your ash tree should be removed. Saving it will only result in a rotted trunk one day failing when it is most inconvenient. Removing it now when it is smaller would be easier as well.

In addition to the advice given for the maple, I would advise against a "bolt" through the two trunks but rather see through bolts with cables higher up into the canopy.

Cabling will put off the inevitable removal of the tree for a decade or more.

The first "fork" appears to actually be two trunks that have grown together. There is no lignin or "glue" when bark occurs against bark. Additionally, the pressure of the to trunks expanding actually causes some necrosis of the tissue at the pressure points. As a very poor compartmentalizer, this will result in some extensive decay over time.

The second "fork" on the left side of the photo is hard to see, but the third fork is clearly developing included bark and is a weak point likely to split in the future.

In the interim, crown reduction pruning done by someone who understands it will also help.

One other solution to consider would be to invest in better replacement trees right away rather than spend money trying to save this one.

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wulkowicz

It strikes me that both trees are savable in concept, both in the present sense, and more importantly in what should have been done years ago. I had posted some comments about dealing with included bark and offered proactive techniques that each successive growing season reduced the problem and strengthened the location.

I may have been mistaken, but I don't remember anybody asking, " Gee, howya do dat?"

I'm not quite prepared right now to deal with any volume of questions or the likely snarlings, but I'll again add the picture and quote from Shigo where I began to point out the solution.

It's simple and common sense, but it requires really thinking outside the box and is part of what I described would be Shigo's New Arborculture.

As a point of discipline, I'll try to work with the photos here and explain as best I can, so I'd appreciate some patience and cooperation. That is not me being dismissive or arrogant, I've just learned my lessons about an audience's need to hoot and me waiting for some of them to calm down.

Naturally, the techniques have some limits that are directly proportional to the time that the problems have persisted. They are best employed when included bark is first discovered and literally reduce the problem to an embedded defect that has less and less structural relevance after each growth season.


Bob Wulkowicz


PS: I'm writing this with a voice recognition system so there are likely to be a number of typos, corruptions of my mutterings, and the possibility that my word processing program also thinks I'm not too bright and therefore modifies my text so that I'm not embarrassed.

That's the new technology; this morning my toaster asked me for my social security number.

Let the muttering begin...

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Eric Frei

As I like real life examples .....



From What - how would you prune this, if at all? Crown restoration of lopped poinciana

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treeseer

Bob help me I don't see anything new in your graphic or text.

There IS a tool that cuts out inclusions; it's called a chisel.

I think the ideal cut is well below what both of you illustrate. Whether one should go that deep at first or later or at all depends on species condition form dose etc.

Eric Frei

We know it's well below, just the tool for the cut .............

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treeseer

Chisels are cheap.

newguy18

you use chisels to get those out?I use a crow bar.

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old schooler

treeseer

crowbars for prying, chisels for cutting, no limits.

newguy18

I know that,i usually make the cut like ekka has shown then smack a pry bar in between the union.It usually pops out fairly easy.On that note if your not careful you can tear the tissue off of the other limb.

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old schooler

wulkowicz

I apologize. I've talked so often and in so many different places that I'll agree I sometimes don't know what I'm talking about. I stated that the trees could be saved in concept and there is the unavoidable fact that the longer things stay as problems the thicker and deeper they become.

Those who remember my mutterings from many years ago would hear me saying, "if your only tool is a saw, all problems are logs." I might expand that today to say, "if your only tools are saws and chisels, all problems are logs and chunks." We need to look honestly at our blind spots. Arborists have a hard time thinking beyond saws, and here have reached spontaneously for chisels. If we're talking about deadwood, finished lumber, or a yearn to sculpt, these tools are quite appropriate.

But the tree is a living creature; filled inside with wood that seduces us into thinking that the tree is only wood. We forget or perhaps it was that we were never taught, but the gossamer engine-- a single layer of cambium shielded by the bark-- is the prime mover and creator of what we understand to be our trees. Where it is gone, there is no growth. When enough is gone, expansion of the woody cylinder stops. Without the continuing expansion, we have deadwood.

It has been generally agreed that the cambium, the gossamer engine, is one cell thick. Anything less than that doesn't physically exist, so the cambium as we see it is the minimal deployment of specific cells that don't spend their time increasing their number and mass, but instead create differentiated daughter cells, zylem to the inside and phloem to the outside. the cambium continues as a single layer, and its continued life is essential to the healthy growth of its woody cylinder.

Nature is wet and sloppy and it can have a few more of one thing or another in different places, but we don't really find rogue patches of cambium inside the cross-sections of the trees we examine. Cellular instructions of the cambium are very disciplined and form the underlying mechanism for most everything from wound closure, to ram's horn, to the eventual re-strengthening of a badly decayed tree.

CODIT is the stalling technique evolved by trees to delay decomposition while the cambium works to create new structures of wood. A successful tree can be enormously hollow, but still structurally stable and extend its life well beyond serious wounding and attack.


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What I offered in Salt Lake City, back more years than I care to count, was simple microsurgery. Reaching into and beneath the bark of a tree to the cambial layer and allowing previously isolated cambium of different cylinders the opportunity to join as a new single sheet. For included bark, the joined cambial sheets go back to business as usual and leave the previous separations behind as embedded defects. Each growth advance of the cambium moves away from the inclusions and the sum of these advances for the growing season is a new thickness of lamination covering the old problems. The years of additional laminations as joined gossamer engines provide the new strength of attachment and the resistance to load an outside stress. At a certain point, it doesn't matter that the juncture contains some percentage of included bark, the strength of that species' wood can be indistinguishable from surrounding healthy joints and attachments.

Like many things, catching stuff early is very important. Reconfiguring the cambium positioning is very easy when the joint is young and can become considerably more difficult as we see in Ekka's photos where it seems that a chainsaw and chisel and the only tools of consequence.

Let's be ethically honest. "Solving" those problems in the traditional way include severe wounding and probable decay in the parent cylinder. I have forever been troubled by the statements that we're fixing a hazardous condition when we look at a subject tree 15 years later and label it as a hazardous tree. Pruning is wounding-- perhaps except for deadwood, and there's no way of escaping that.

I'm not saying take up another career, or charging anybody as unprofessional. The New Arboriculture will have more than saws and arborists will climb in the trees with a small bag of new tools on their belt, and because they understand the growth and biological dynamic of trees a bit better, they will select the tools necessary for minimum damage and the expanded healthy life of that tree.



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There is a remarkable thread in this forum called Brace Grafting by mmatch, that is one of the most remarkable, spontaneous, intuitive series of thoughts about the things I left out my previous post.

I am impressed with his presentation and questions, and with the direction he is trying to offer the readers. Counter-intuitive explanations are very difficult for anybody to accept.

Emboldened by a kindred spirit in another series of posts, I do intend to participate more, and likely a bit more noisily. I do suggest that people read read mmatch's entire series of posts. They are provocative and important. He is saying what I had forgotten to say.



Bob Wulkowicz


ps: if the attachment worked, here is a photo of brace grafting that wanders into a structural engineer's wet dream.

Gentlemen, and gentlewomen, start your engines.

treeseer

sorry bob try again

wulkowicz

Let me just give you the url for many pictures and such:

Trees with Unusual Trunks - DirtDoctor.com - Howard Garrett - The Dirt Doctor

tubs

dannyboysfc

I live less than 30 minutes from the park where those trees are located and unfortunately have never been there. They look mighty cool and impresive though.