Trees get care

Our first driveway tree construction casualty made itself obvious last spring and has been dropping larger boughs in the high winds recently. Our tree specialist told Norris he would be here at 8:00 this morning. About 8:02, the tree had been placed just where they wanted it, on the driveway, missing the mail box and the neighbors' trees across the street. The tree is now cut up and ready to be hauled away.


For perspective, the tiny man standing in the road is probably 6 feet tall. The photo was taken from our front deck railing. The second man is not visible but he's behind a foreground tree.

This tree is our "first" casualty because after our Virginia experience, we have to imagine other trees were fatally wounded, but are dying more slowly than that one, which was closest to the concrete.

The tree crew were going to work on two Woolly Adelgid-infested hemlock trees near our screened porch. The microscopic Woolly Adelgid is an invader from Asia that is killing the Eastern Hemlock. It attaches cottony-looking egg sacs to the needles, visible on the lower limbs of the trees.

In the summer, the tree will be so covered with this stuff it will look like it's been snowing. The currently recommended treatments are insecticidal soaps and systemic treatment with pesticides. For large tracts of public land, scientists are experimenting with imported beetles that feed exclusively on the adelgid larvae, and don't reproduce where they have no food source. The two trees we wanted to have treated are too tall to make the soap spraying practical, and we don't have access to imported beetles. But our specialist decided it is too late in the fall - he'll have to come back in the spring to give them the pesticide.

They moved on to removing some dead trees in back of the house, trimming dead pine boughs from the trees we look out on from the deck, and removing unhealthy limbs over the stairs to the logging road. Coincidentally, Norris had training today in woodland and wildfires. His class was told that all dead limbs in the 10-foot off the ground range in the area around a dwelling should be cleared, or they are potentially deadly fire hazards. The trimming from the ground went on for a while until our friend Tarzan finally went up in this one -- Here's a closer view of Tarzan at work -


We waited till after a hard freeze to have all this work done, to minimize impact on these basically healthy trees. Cutting the boughs during warmer weather leaves the trees vulnerable to insect infestation.