How to Assess the Health of Your Trees

David Epstein: Welcome to GrowingWisdom. I am here with Dave Ropes of Tree Specialists and we are going to be talking today about a tree and its sort of structural integrity and some of the options that I have in order to be sure that this thing does not fall on my yard and then what to look for.

Dave Ropes: Okay great! First thing that I would do if I am assessing the overall tree is I would look at the canopy because that gives you an indication of kind of the overall vigor of the plant. This tree does look healthy. The foliage is full, an appropriate color for the time of year, appropriate foliar size for the species. So, the next thing I would be focusing in on is the trunk. As we move around the base of the tree, we are looking for cavities and as you can see, this tree has quite a sizeable cavity right at the base. The hole is a hole of the heartwood in the tree so this is a young stem of a black cherry tree. This is the heartwood in the center and you could see that it is dry and that is because it is basically dead wood. It is solid. It is in decayed but it is dead wood. This is the sapwood around the perimeter that is responsible for moving water and nutrients and temporary storage of food materials. So, a tree can loose this heartwood and yet still retain enough of the sapwood to keep the foliar canopy full and “healthy”. It is very common and if you think about a pipe, a pipe is hallow and yet it is very strong. The other thing we are looking at here is the seam that runs down between these two stems and this is an area called of an included bark. Two individual stems are both producing bark tissue and even though the tissues are very pressed up against each other, there will always be the seam of included bark in the center of the stamp and overtime this becomes quite a split and represents a real weakness for the tree structure.

David Epstein: If I get two healthy branches, can I do something to strengthen this?

Dave Ropes: Absolutely! We install structural braces of two different kinds. One is a rod brace which is put right through the trunk of the tree down at more closer to ground level and the other thing is a cable brace system which is a galvanized multi-strand wire that is installed up in the top of the tree.

David Epstein: Well, I hope you learned a lot about tree structure in this edition of GrowingWisdom. I want to thank Dave Ropes for being here from Tree Specialists and we really appreciate it. Come back every week for all of our videos here at GrowingWisdom.com.