Yo! Was winding down and the realization spawned that I totally forgot to prep the September newsletter. Whoops!

Due to my lack of preparation here, we’re riffing. Here’s some late night flow:

This summer seems to be a particularly bad year for Dutch Elm Disease on my side of Michigan. Both treated and non-treated elms are having a fit. Check out this dead mammoth we saw last week:

Real shame that one. Huge! I don’t know its backstory, but an impressive problem now. Hundred-plus year’s worth of effort gone in less than one. The few American elm survivors dwindle, and their offspring germinate now in a fence line to be treated as weeds. What a fate.

Another thought I’ve been chewing on lately is a funny one. The more trees I examine and work with that have considerable root damage, the less confident I feel about making predictions about them. More experience → less confidence. Perhaps I’m in the ‘valley of despair’ of the Dunning-Kruger curve. How comforting.

Honestly, the incoming few paragraphs could become an article lol. Anyway, here’s the thing:

Plenty of street trees in my area are subjected to major root damage during sidewalk panel replacements. Here’s just one of my many examples:

Picture doesn’t really do the height of this gouging into the fused root plate justice. Maybe 12 inches? The diameter of this silver maple was 50+ inches at breast height. Probably quite familiar with this kind of abuse living in a place like this.

While I didn’t do any hardcore health analyses, I didn’t feel like I needed to. All of the visual metrics checked out. Despite the massively gouged root plate, the tree wasn’t showing obvious signs of major root dysfunction in the crown.

But if you had asked me if it were OK to do that to a tree of that size and life stage, I’d certainly have said no.

HOWEVER! I routinely see other trees with far less damage to their root plates from sidewalk replacements that are in serious distress. Factors compound, not all root plate morphologies are the same, yes yes.

My point is this variance of symptom development across so many different species sort of led me to create the Project Trees video last month.

I was a third opinion on a tree that had this done to it:

My first reaction was laughter at the absurdity of what I was seeing. Yes, that is a pile of torn roots.

This tree came to me at the right moment during these musings though. Just like I said would happen in the Project Trees video, I explained everything I just wrote to you to them, yada yada yada. This is now a tree that I get to try with.

Those street trees get no management, they get no helping hand at all. And sometimes they persist without issue. Do they always? Of course not. But they can.

Using those abused street trees as my inspiration, this tree is one of my project trees. No doubt this is a significant amount of damage. The undamaged roots are in soil now quite compacted by equipment.

The plan is straightforward and probably looks like how you think it looks. Serious decompaction plan, some resistance-inducing treatments, no pruning till we see what’s what. All photosynthetic area is precious for now.

Alright, that’s the end of my allotted time for this thang. Could go on and on, but I’ve gotta be diligent with my own stress management, ya know? Time to call it there. Get some sleep.

Savor the cool summer weather while you can.

Jeremiah & TF