Topic
Articles on damaged trees: shelf fungi and hollow trunks, sapsucker holes, wasp galls, included bark, and how to tell what matters from what does not.
What to worry about and what to leave alone, on trees you already have. When a tree is past saving, the tree finder narrows the natives that would take its place, and the companion species tool shows what belongs beside them.
What the dark stripes on beech leaves mean, how far beech leaf disease has spread and what treatment can do for a yard tree, and whether to plant beech now.
What makes knotty burls grow on oak and maple trunks, why cutting one off hurts more than leaving it, and how to tell a burl from a gall or canker by the bark.
Why oaks drop small branches in summer and fall, how the cut end shows whether a squirrel, a beetle or the tree itself did it, and what to do with the twigs.
Why a young tree's bark splits or dies on its sunny side in winter, which trees are at risk, what a trunk wrap can and cannot prevent, and how cracks close.
Trees carry sleeping buds in their bark for decades. A broken top, hard pruning or sudden sun wakes them. What the sprouts mean and what to do with them.
A trunk that looks like one stem can be two or three that grew together with bark trapped inside. How clumps form, why fused trunks fail, and what to do early.
Cut just outside the branch collar, never flush and never leaving a stub. How to find the collar, use three cuts instead of one, and pick the right season.
Neat rows of small holes weeping sap are the work of a sapsucker, not a borer. What the bird is doing, who else feeds at the holes, and when it matters.
Oak apples, bullet galls, wool sower galls and woody twig knobs are all grown by the tree around a tiny wasp. They look like disease and almost never are.
Well under one percent of eastern forest is old growth. The six outward signs of an old tree, where old stands hide, and how to steer a woodlot back toward it.
Hollow trunks, torn-out limbs and shelf fungi look like the end. Trees can live for decades or centuries in that state, and here is how to tell when it matters.