Tree Preservation

Why a healthy tree is worth the trouble

A mature Sugar Maple or White Oak over a house is eighty or a hundred years of growth. Nobody can buy that back, and nothing you plant in its place will do the same job in your lifetime. It is shade on the west wall in August, it is the reason the yard is not a wind tunnel, and it is a real part of what the property is worth.

We remove trees for a living and we still say this: plenty of the trees we are called out to look at do not need to come out. Some need deadwood taken out, some need a limb reduced, some need the ground around them left alone for a few years, and some need nothing but an honest second opinion. You will be told which one you have.

Construction is what actually kills them

If you are building, adding on, putting in a pool, a shop, a septic bed or a new driveway, this is the section that matters. The tree does not die that summer, which is exactly why the connection gets missed. It dies three to five years later and everybody blames the weather.

Compaction. A tree's fine feeder roots are in the top foot of soil and they need air. Running loaded machinery, parking, or stacking material over the root zone crushes the pore space out of the ground. The roots suffocate slowly. This is the most common construction injury and the least visible.

Cutting roots. A trench for services, footings or a foundation cut along one side of a tree can take a serious share of its roots and most of its anchorage on that side. A tree can survive losing some roots. It cannot survive losing a quarter of them and then standing through a February wind.

Grade change. Adding fill over the root zone buries the roots too deep for air, and cutting the grade down removes the layer they live in. Either direction, six inches is plenty to do real damage.

What to do instead. Mark a protection zone before anything arrives on site, fence it, and keep everything outside it: no traffic, no parking, no material storage, no washout, no fill. Where a service run has to cross a root zone, tunnelling under rather than trenching through it saves the tree and is usually cheaper than replacing a hundred years of it. And decide what is being kept before the machines come, not after.

The preservation work itself

Structural pruning, which is the opposite of topping. Deadwood out, badly attached or rubbing limbs dealt with, a heavy or overextended limb reduced back to a proper lateral, and a crowded crown thinned selectively. Done on a cycle of a few years this keeps a big tree sound instead of letting one limb pick its own moment. How it is done is on the pruning page, and why topping is not it is in the guide on why not to top a tree.

Cabling and bracing for a codominant stem or a weak union that is worth supporting rather than losing. It is a real option on a tree worth keeping, it is not a permanent fix, and it needs looking at periodically rather than fitting and forgetting.

Root collar work. Trees planted too deep, or buried under years of mulch piled against the trunk, grow girdling roots that strangle them slowly. Finding the flare and getting it back into air is straightforward work that saves trees people had written off.

Mulch, properly. A wide ring of chip out over the root zone, kept two to three inches deep and pulled back clear of the trunk. Not a volcano piled up the bark, which holds moisture against it and rots it. The mulch from your own job is usually the right material for this.

Young tree care. Take the strap off. A tie left on from planting girdles the trunk, and taking it off is a five minute job that saves the tree. Early structural pruning on a young tree costs almost nothing and prevents the expensive problem it becomes at forty.

Honest risk assessment. Looking at a tree you are worried about and saying what is actually wrong with it, what the realistic failure is, and whether it is a removal, a reduction, a monitoring job or nothing at all.

Ash, and knowing when preservation is the wrong answer

Emerald Ash Borer went through this region years ago and the Ash are mostly dead or dying. An untreated Ash that is already thinning badly is not a preservation candidate, it is a removal that gets more dangerous the longer it waits, because dead Ash goes brittle fast and stops being safe to climb. There is a full guide on what to do with a dead Ash.

The same honesty applies elsewhere. A tree with a failing union directly over the kids' bedroom, extensive decay at the base, or a lean that has recently changed is not a candidate for saving. Preservation is not a promise to keep everything. It is a decision, taken with the tree in front of us, about which trees are worth the work and which ones are not.

And a tree in the wrong place stays in the wrong place. A Spruce three feet from a wall was planted in the wrong spot and no amount of careful pruning fixes that. Saying so is more useful to you than pretending otherwise.

By-laws, reports and where we stop

Municipalities across Durham Region and Northumberland County have tree by-laws, and many of them protect trees over a certain size, or any tree on a site with a development application, whether or not it is in your back garden. Conservation authority rules apply again near watercourses, valley slopes and wetlands.

Where your municipality or your builder wants a formal arborist report, a tree inventory or a tree protection plan as part of a permit or site plan, say so at the quote and you will get a straight answer about whether that is something we can do for you or whether what you need is a consulting arborist. We would rather tell you that up front than take the job and leave you short of the paperwork.

What we will always do is tell you plainly when a job looks like it needs a check before anybody starts. That question is cheap before the work and expensive afterwards.