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David Epstein: Welcome to Growing Wisdom, I am here with Dave Ropes of Trees Specialist and we are going to be talking today about a tree and its sort of structural integrity. And, some of the options that I have in order to be sure that this thing does not fall on my yard, and then what to look for?
Dave Ropes: Okay, great. The first thing that I would do if I am assessing the overall trees I would look at the canopy.
David Epstein: Okay.
Dave Ropes: Because that gives you an indication of kind of the overall figure of the plant. This tree does look healthy, the foliages fall, inappropriate color for the time of the year, appropriate foliar sides for the species. So the next thing I would be focusing in on is, is the trunk. As we move around the base of the tree, we are looking for cavities, and as you can see this tree has quite the sizable cavity right at the base. The hole is a whole of the heartwood on the tree. So, this is a young stem of a black cherry tree. This is the heartwood in the center, and you could see that it is dry and that is because it is basically dead wood. It is solid, it is not decayed, but it is dead wood.
This is the sapwood around the perimeter that is responsible for moving water and nutrients and temporary storage of food materials. So a tree can lose its heartwood and yet still retain enough for the sapwood to keep the foliar canopy falling conical healthy. It is very common and if you think about a pipe, a pipe is hollow and yet it is very strong. The other thing that we are looking at here is the seam that runs down between these two stems. And, this is an area called of an included bark. Two individual stems are both producing bark tissue, and even though the tissues are very pressed up against each other, they will always be the seen of included bark in the center of the stem. And over time, this becomes quite a split and it represents a real weakness for the tree structure.
David Epstein: If I get two healthy branches, can I do something to strengthen this?
Dave Ropes: Absolutely, we install structural braces of two different kinds. One is a rod brace, which is put right to the trunk of the tree down at more closely to the ground level. And, the other thing is a cable brace system, which is a galvanized multi-strand wire that is installed up in the top of the tree.
David Epstein: Well I hope you learn a lot about tree structure in this edition of Growing Wisdom, I want to thank Dave Ropes for being here from Tree Specialist and we really appreciate it. Come back every week for all of our videos here at GrowingWisdom.com.
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