Lost a big maple last month because I ignored girdling roots

Had a client in Maplewood call me about a big sugar maple that looked fine in spring but dropped leaves by August. I checked the canopy but didn't dig around the base close enough. Turned out there were girdling roots wrapped halfway around the trunk that slowly choked it out over 10 years. Tree came down last month on a calm day with no warning. Now I always spend 10 minutes scraping dirt off the root flare on every job. Anyone else had a tree fail from something hiding underground?

3 comments

3 Comments

alice_palmer2016d ago

Oh man, that hits close to home. I had a similar thing happen with a big oak in my own yard a few years back. Looked healthy as could be, but one windy spring day it just split right down the middle. When I cut it up I found a old fence wire about an inch deep in the trunk, all rusted and grown over. The tree had been slowly strangling itself for decades and nobody knew. Now I always walk the property line with a metal detector before planting anything new, just in case.

veram9915d ago

That line about the tree "slowly strangling itself for decades" is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I got a cheap metal detector after my neighbor found an old rebar stake poking through his fence line maple. And to @gavinw45's point, I bet half the stuff buried out there is just waiting to cause problems nobody sees coming. Still, part of me wonders if we're all just overthinking it, and those trees have been dealing with junk in their roots for way longer than we've been around to notice.

gavinw4516d ago

Walked around my own yard with a shovel and found an old clothesline wrapped around a maple root last summer. Funny (and kind of scary) how you can look at a tree for years and never see what's going on underneath. I dug it up and cut the wire before it did any real damage, but it got me thinking about all the other stuff buried out there from previous owners. Now I keep a magnet on a string in the shed just to sweep the ground whenever I'm about to plant something new. Saves a lot of heartbreak down the road, you know?