This tree was dead, right?
Hello, arborists: was this Siberian elm still alive? I don't know much about trees, but when getting an estimate to remove a clearly dead branch, the tree company told me the tree as a whole was dead and that the green still on it was just offshoots still receiving nutrients from the dead trunk.
The trunk had some pretty big hollow parts with a little bit of crumbly wood inside while the bark seemed to have some sort of sawdust on it, but I just sent this picture to my girlfriend and she fears we cut down a healthy tree. This picture is NOT a cross-section of the main trunk, because we decided to leave about nine feet of it for wildlife purposes; I can add pictures of the main trunk in the morning when the lighting is better. Is there any evidence of death in this picture, though, so I can ease her mind tonight that we did the right thing? Thank you in advance for any help; please ignore the red lines, that was my crude attempt to count the rings.