By Barbara Bernard
Union-News, Springfield, Mass., Holyoke edition
Tuesday, September 3, 2002
I have just finished a really comprehensive study of trees, and it is not that I intend to apply for a job with Mike Kane, Tom Kass, the Holyoke Forestry Department or any others who have tree services.
But, I didn't know much about trees and felt since I have a few of them on my property and they, like I, are getting old, I probably should look ahead to what just might happen.
With great interest I've watched some magnificent trees be trimmed and cabled, braced and even have rotting cavities filled to strengthen them.
People tend to do this when trees have a sentimental value or when, for a substantial investment of time and money, they can safely remain standing. At one point there was a mountain ash on my front lawn that I especially liked and which always brought a day of amusement for me when birds would flock to devour all the berries.
There was something about these berries that caused the birds to react like people do with alcohol. They literally got tipsy. But the barroom scene had to come to an end when the tree died and posed a danger if there had been a severe storm. It had to be removed.
Replacing it with another mountain ash didn't make much sense to me and so I chose a dogwood. John Morton from A-1 Landscaping selected it for me, and it's pretty. It took a few years before it began to look like a tree, which is always the sad realization when older people plant trees. There were days when I worried that, just like buying a puppy who would outlive me, my new tree might not be mature before I went on to that arbor in the sky. But I seem to be lasting and so is my dogwood tree.
But let me share one vital fact about trees that I have learned. It is the danger of a rotting center. Trees have a vital core that is dense, called heartwood. Heartwood is actually dead. It still, however, has some strength because it's inside the sapwood and tree bark. But if anything happens to the outer layers, things ranging from insect attacks to being hit by a car, that heartwood gets exposed to damaging things and something called "heart rot" begins to hollow out the tree.
Although most of the time it's an outside force that starts the problem, some trees, mostly large ones, have sort of a bowl where all big limbs grow out from the trunk.
As rainwater collects in this bowl, eventually rot will occur. Heart rot, unfortunately, never improves and for your safety the tree should either be removed or, if you really insist on saving the tree, there are some methods of bracing. Please let a professional do this.
According to the American Society of Consulting Arborists, shade trees are more prone to heart rot.
The cavity, which starts near the bottom of the tree, may not be visible, but there are a few signs that this problem is there. They include things such as woodpecker holes in the trunk, carpenter ants entering and exiting a small hole in the trunk, flat mushrooms that look like shelves growing on the sides of the tree's trunk, flaking bark and sometimes a dark oozing that will emerge from the tree's trunk especially after a heavy rain.
If I may paraphrase Joyce Kilmer's poem "Tree," "I think that I shall never see, a newspaper column as lovely as a tree . . . columns are written by fools like me . . . but only God can make a tree."
And of course to keep God's trees healthy we need to keep a watchful eye on them and have the wisdom to call in the experts when trouble appears.