American Elm split (zone 6a)
Curious how long she’ll hang on and she’ll recover at all? I know these won’t grow back together, more curious how well elm could grow a new leader and give it another go for a bit.
Notes - the tree is at least a couple hundred feet from any building, infrastructure, houses, where people would normally go, etc. Grows in the common area between houses in a neighborhood. Functions mainly as a nice tree to look and block out the view of the neighbors. As far as I know the split happened sometime in early June, but appears to have had quite the V shape going on. Sucks we’re going to lose it at some point. It was the first tree I planted when we moved here and was maybe a couple feet tall. Roughly it might be close to 30 ft tall-ish. The plus side is that this group of trees has a few that will probably benefit from the new light - I think they put a hit out on the elm. Forest turf war kind of stuff. Anyway, the plan is to let it fall and move on from there. The goal is to build that area into a forest/habitat area for wildlife and generally let nature do its thing. Circle of life, and bonus points for screening the neighbor. Though a part of me wants it to hang on, I’m sort of hoping it goes sooner so the other trees can get on with it. I also understand that when one or both sides fall, some of the surrounding trees will take damage from the body blows. Collateral foliage, if you will. Should be minor HP loss and overall the health bar should remain green. From memory, there’s a London plane tree, Austrian pine?, a couple white pine, eastern red cedar or two, burr oak x2, pin oak, and black oak.