It’s our job to make sure that your trees are preserved and in good health. With that in mind, we understand more than anyone how to identify when your trees are dying and need that care, whether to find a way to keep them alive or eventually remove them. Our ISA-certified arborists can find the silent but deadly signs that most people can’t see when trying to understand how close their trees are to dying.
In this blog, we will break down 4 silent signs that show your tree might be dying and needs to be preserved or removed.
Silent Sign #1: The Leaves and Branches Tell a Story
Have you ever just sat down and spent time staring at the trees when it’s a nice day out? Have you ever noticed anything different about those trees? Well… there’s a good chance you won’t notice, because a lot of people don’t see one of the biggest silent signs of a tree potentially dying.
If you’ve looked at the leaves, you’ve probably not noticed that they are significantly smaller than they normally are. Sparse or undersized leaves are a major sign of silent death in trees. This type of condition is a sign of stress (kind of like with humans, we shrink in size over time, and it shows a sign of death that’s imminent). Drought, disease, or even something as unchecked as poor soil can lead to these stresses being as prominent as they are as factors involved with tree death.
Drought is what prevents a water shortage for the leaves to gain nutrients, or say if the tree is somewhere in a spot of land that doesn’t get water because of the direction the water travels, then that’s just an unlucky case of placement for that tree. Diseases are caused by a lack of water or because bugs eat away at the parts of a leaf that allow it to grow or not shrink in size. Just about every year or every few years, it’s proper to give your plants and trees new soil, because if they don’t get that, the tree as a whole won’t grow at all, leaves or otherwise. Annually or every few years is when you should give them new soil.
Dead branches are a normal occurrence, but if the number starts increasing, especially considering the number you’ve seen on the ground, then the alarm bells should start going off. What you should do is perform a stress test. If the tree still has some weight to it when you bend it, then it should still be relatively healthy, but if it snaps instantly, then your tree is either diseased or decaying rapidly.
Photo credit: https://seacoasttreecare.com/blog/importance-removing-dead-damaged-tree-branches
Silent Sign #2: The Roots (What You Actually CAN’T See)
The deadly signs of death that are REALLY what you can’t see stem (pun intended) from the very part of plant life that keeps our trees running. When roots are negatively affected or damaged, you are most likely not going to know about it. The way to determine if your roots are suffering will come from several conditions that the trees are experiencing.
Roots can come out of the ground; that’s not a good thing, and if you do notice that, inspect it immediately! It could be that they are out of the ground because of weather or erosion, but there are other possibilities. If you notice that the roots are soft and spongy, it often points to root rot, caused by excessive amounts of moisture on them.
Photo credit: https://www.independenttree.com/six-signs-that-it-is-time-to-remove-a-tree/
Silent Sign #3: The Decay of the Bark and Trunk
When you were young, did you ever go up to a tree and, by mistake, pull the bark off? We know you’ve done it, and yet, at the time, you probably didn’t realize that that was also a potential case of a tree dying.
Take a silent sign like when you see sap oozing from a tree, that’s not a tree going through a normal process of photosynthesis or another function to help it grow, that’s a sign of it being melded with, probably from an invasive insect. Insects can either feed on sap inside a tree, excrete it out through the bark, or damage it enough that the tree will release it on its own.
Finally, pay close attention to the way the bark cracks. Nine times out of ten, if you see a bark, you might think it came from something being hit against the tree, but it can also be internal. If the tree’s bark cracks at a certain angle or long enough that it might span a good portion of the tree’s length, then that is a sign of concern.
Photo credit: https://www.lawnstarter.com/blog/tree-care/why-is-tree-leaking-sap/
Silent Sign #4: Infestation of Those Sneaky Insects
Let’s talk more about those pesky little insects because, like the roots, this is also a scenario where you really won’t be able to see the silent sign of a tree’s eventual death. Invasive insects have a way of damaging a tree’s internal systems long before the visible symptoms appear on the outside.
Wood-boring insects, beetles, caterpillars, and many more different variants can sneak by enough to elude your sight. Our blog page is filled with topics covering insects like the Boxwood Moth, or what insects infect Hemlock trees, as examples.
Be on the lookout and inspect your leaves for chewing or discoloration, branches and the trunk for holes or weird carvings, and the base for root issues or sap leaks.
Photo credit: https://extension.umd.edu/resources/yard-garden/invasive-species/invasive-insects/ (Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University)
If you believe that any one of these four silent signs of death is affecting your tree, please give us a call immediately! Our certified arborists will quickly identify the problem. The more specific you are in identifying any of the instances we discussed in the blog, the better off we are when we can help.