Like Old Soldiers, Ancient Trees Never Say Die And They Fade Away Even More Slowly

When people buy a run-down rural or suburban dwelling, usually at much less cost than building for themselves, they derive a special kind of satisfaction from renovating their old "bargain," or so remodeling as to make it truly their own, not just a hand-me-down. Money and effort so spent seem to them doubly creative, as indeed they are. In proportion as the house is ancient, the newcomers are preserving history, and converting to their own comfort a valid remnant of human experience.

Hand in hand with an old house usually come old trees —mute but vital witnesses to the thought and feeling that made this place a home. Restoring these remnants too will help the newcomers to express and establish their own home-love, and more profoundly. The old house could be replaced by a new one in a matter of months. To regrow the old trees might take a century.

The question of what to do for old trees, and when to do it, is never so pressing as questions about an ancient house. This is a large part of old trees' charm. There they have stood for generations, while people came and went; and there, though they may be infirm and slowly dying, they will continue to stand for some time to come. Like old soldiers, old trees never say die, and unless they are hit by a sure killer such as Dutch elm disease or chestnut blight, their fadeaway is slower and more gradual than most humans'. Resuscitating them can wait at least until the old house's new roof is paid for.

But don't postpone a survey of your old trees: an analysis of their condition and needs, and a reliable idea of what their repair will cost. To get these, there is no middle way. You need a professional. The sooner you call one in, the more the trees will mean to you from then on. For such a survey there is, or should be, no charge. Free estimates, and fair ones, are a hallmark of sincere tree service.

Safety is your first concern in this scrutiny. Your own eye can tell you if a heavy limb or broken peak hangs perilously over architecture, walk, or driveway. But experience is needed to spot a faulty crotch, a critical cavity, a trunk more "dozy" than it appears from the outside, or a tree whose imbalance is precarious because of the place it stands and the prevailing winds. Such structural dangers had better be faced and fixed than ignored and regretted. "Extended coverage" for storm damage is a term which most insurance companies construe loosely. It may cover the havoc wrought by a wind incontestably high, but not what an old tree wrecks when it collapses under heavy rain or snow. Even if you do collect on such damage, the inconvenience you suffer can be more grievous than a tree surgeon's bill for measures of prudence.

After they have been made safe, the next thing to do for old trees is renew their vigor. Enough has been said above (Chapter IV) about tree feeding to provide guidance for doing or bossing this work yourself. To recapitulate:

Your soil strata and the levels at which your trees' roots run can be determined by digging a few test holes.

If the root systems are predominantly shallow, simple broadcasting, and spiking the turf, may be the soundest way to reach them with fertilizer.

"How Long Must We Wait for Shade?" One quick answer to the new home owner's most pressing question is provided by Princeton Nurseries' new strain of locust called the Shademaster. The stock in rows above are only three years old. At right, a specimen of the same strain after three more years. The backboard is eighteen feet high.

Mature at Forty. Within two human generations this silver linden has reached its present splendor. The flagpole is fifty feet high. (Photograph: Princeton Nurseries)

Balling and Burlapping by professionals at Howe Nurseries, Pennington, N. J, Such work goes rapidly with many hands in the act. One man can get the same results if he takes his time. Nursery trees like these have been root-pruned in previous

The spades go down around.

The root-ball comes out.
 
The burlap bag is formed.

A row of London planes ready to move.

A Neighborhood Menaced. Full of faulty crotches and trunk cavities, top-heavy with overgrowth and lush foliage, this silver maple nearly a hundred feet high menaces life, limb, architecture, and traffic. Huge yard trees, especially of such brittle species, should be severely topped and pruned, and multiple cabled. Note how this treacherous monster dwarfs the human lives beneath it.
 
If they root deeply, and the punch-bar or injector-needle methods of feeding are used, put the food insertions much closer together, more shallow, and extend them much farther beyond the branch spreads than most "experts" recommend.

Give up to five pounds of well-balanced dry fertilizer, or five gallons of dissolved, for each inch of trunk diameter breast high.

If an old tree seems in dire condition, and its special character impels you to give it special treatment, there are measures which the expert can take that have not been mentioned. One of these is foliar feeding—spraying the leaves with a solution containing freely available nitrogen, for quick assimilation into the sapstream. This procedure, which resembles putting a human patient under an oxygen tent, can be combined with an attack on the immediate cause of the tree's trouble, such as an insect (like gall mite) or a fungus disease (like anthracnose). A specific control agent for the parasite is sprayed on along with the nutrient solution.

Another procedure parallels intravenous feeding. An in-vigorator is put directly into the ailing tree's sap channels through holes bored at intervals around the trunk, where bottles with feeder tubes are hung.

Neither of the remedies just mentioned is inexpensive, and they should be bought only from practitioners of the highest repute. But sometimes one or both will work wonders, and well repay you.

It has been pointed out that, often as not, the basic cause of trouble aloft in an old tree lies down in its underpinning, (See Photos. 3, 4, 5.) In finding and relieving "girdling" roots, your own efforts can match the experts'. But when severe restriction of moisture and nutrients has been of such long duration as to cause major dieback in a tree's head, much pruning will be needed aloft, of wood alive as well as dead. For this part of a salvage job it is folly not to hire professionals. Ladders, ropes, and sharp tools up old trees are not for the novice.

Beyond such suggestions it is no more possible to generalize about treatment for infirm old trees than for infirm old people. Individuals alter cases, no two are just alike. More helpful will be some particularizing, from specific case histories:

On its savage transit in 1960, Hurricane Donna laid low a certain magnificent white oak—almost the peer of the Mercer Oak on the Princeton battlefield (See Photo. 1) or the Joyce Kilmer tree at New Brunswick. When we were asked to appraise its value for insurance purposes (our figure was about $1800, for, though the tree was faulty, a guesthouse had been sited expressly to enjoy it), we were also asked if anything might have been done—years ago— to safeguard such a monarch from such a fate. When we knocked the clinging sod and soil off its upturned roots, the great oak's Achilles' heel came immediately to view. Three main roots had been crossed and strangled by a fourth of equal size. The damage had been done right where the tapering of the killed roots should have gripped the ground most strongly. Whether or not timely excision of the constrictor root would have saved the rest, and judicious feeding on that side have improved the tree's anchorage, was of course problematical. But certainly, had its weakness been known, the tree's safety could have been secured by installing support cables.

The same hurricane leveled a huge and gorgeous English walnut around which the owner had focused all her garden planting and pleasure, including a swimming pool. This tree's massive roots were snapped like fiddlestrings, but they all appeared to be in perfect health. The fact was, their very health had helped bring about the tree's downfall. In that well-watered and fertilized site they had produced such a luxuriant crown that the walnut, for want of thinning aloft—and carrying a full September load of nuts, too—was top-heavy. Drenched by Donna's downpour, blasted by her gusts like a tall schooner under full sail, the tree had capsized despite its splendid root system—or because of it. Here lay a lesson in few words: it is possible, through fondness, to grow "too much tree."

A case where ounces of prevention probably averted tons of woe was that of a lofty sycamore, one of those commanding, brightly mottled specimens sometimes called sachem. It stands close to a couple's cosy farmhouse, in the front lawn, where its position is such that a gaping hollow in its lower trunk, caused long ago by fire, presented an eyesore to the front porch and living room. We were asked to fill that cavity, for appearance's sake. We demurred, citing the cost, and persuaded the owners to let us remove about six truckloads of topside deadwood, caused by the damage below. We traced, rodded, and painted the cavity, making it almost as presentable as an expensive filling would have done, and even safer and healthier. Then we told the owners that, when next they fertilized their peach orchard, they might feed their old sycamore a few hundred pounds. This they did, and when a big blow knocked down several much younger, untended trees in their grounds a few seasons later, the sachem stood unscathed, and still so stands.

Another couple called us in to look at their feature black ash, a mastlike forty-incher. After long years of flourishing, the tree's head was now dying back on two sides and such new growth as it did make was coming out puny. Some one had told the owners that the tree was obviously blighted and had best be taken down, while the sawlogs were still good, before it died and fell. The tree stood in a corner of the clients' property, enclosed by a privet hedge on the same two sides that looked so sickly aloft. We asked how long the privet had been there. They said four years. With this as a clue, we dug down beside the privet and, at three feet, came to a thick layer of shale, on top of which ran the ash roots. Any shallower-rooted tree might have obstructed, or prevented, the privet's planting. As it was, the privet—a growth as greedy as ash—was robbing its big neighbor and starving it out. The solution: deep-feed the ash, and remove the hedge at its corner.

As you drive through the countryside looking at other people's trees, notice that some of the most picturesque and interesting ones are the most imperfect. They are veterans whose characters are accentuated if not entirely imparted by their scars, deformities, or malignancies. To mind comes many a storm-tattered white pine, towering above its surroundings with what look like wild pennons of courage still flying high. Such landmarks can be preserved for generations by keeping their stubs trimmed, their diet ample, and by getting an electrician (a tree expert will be higher priced) to install lightning protection.

To mind comes an ancient catalpa, in a fine New Jersey lawn, which is bowed over so far that its trunk is horizontal, its branches vertical. (See Photo. 23.) Many people might have removed such a freak long ago, but the owners of this one cherish it. It looks like—and perhaps it is—an old trail-marker of the Delaware Indians.

On a back road in the Watchung hills stand four ancient red oaks, all much squattier than is their species* habit and each with grotesque lumps and knobs where the main lower limbs should be. Perhaps they were amputated in their youth by some woodsman, clearing a tote road, who was too busy to fell the trees entirely. Then cankers set in which deformed but failed to kill them, so that they have aged like a quartet of gnarled gnomes crouching at the roadside. To worry about the health of such a group, if they lived in your grounds, would be silly. To remove them in favor of more graceful trees would be to compound the woodsman's felony.

Most country dwellers are charmed and flattered when wild creatures take up residence in their grounds. An old tree with otherwise deplorable dead stubs and cavities extends a warm invitation to wrens, bluebirds, woodpeckers, sparrow hawks, and the smaller owls, saw-whet and screech. Squirrels—red, gray, and flying—which might otherwise invade your attic will be content if they have a derelict tree to nest in. If rowdy starlings or English sparrows move in, there is one sure cure: a swab of kerosene.

The fondest possession of one gracious lady who wanted us to manicure all her other trees was a disreputable old silver maple close to her front patio. This one we were forbidden to touch, for in it, in a major cavity, lived a family of raccoons whose matriarch led forth her brood in the summer dusks and marched them across the lawn, down the driveway, for their fishing lessons at the creek.

If the old rampike that you leave standing for wild guests really disfigures its setting, plant trumpet-creeper or wisteria at its base and turn it into a showpiece. Against the day when it must fall down, plant a replacement tree nearby, but not too near.

A curious thing about some old trees is this: when they never looked better, they may be approaching their worst. A superannuated apple tree, for example, after years of steady decline will suddenly surprise you one spring by bursting into exaggerated bloom. Though it has borne little or no fruit for the longest time, this year it will produce quantities. Then, within another year or two, the tree is dead or next thing to it.

Authorities vary in their explanations of such behavior, which of course is variously caused. But in a general way there seems to be truth in the old saying, "That's Nature's way of perpetuating the species." Old trees with new troubles or an accumulation of chronic ones sometimes react with a burst of energy, as if trying to save themselves or their kind, and then give up trying.

The phenomenon is mentioned in this discussion of arboreal geriatrics because another fact about it is this; such dying-gasp or death-throe activity will appear in old trees that have been entirely neglected, whose trouble is truly mortal, but seldom in trees that you have tried to help. If your feeding, root relief, and topside pruning have started an old tree on a new lease of life, you are not likely to see quick, dramatic results. Leaf color and annual growth will improve, dieback will lessen, but any stimulation provided by you should not produce suddenly a cloud of dogwood blossoms or a copious crop of spruce cones. If you do get such results, you are probably overdoing something, or doing something wrong.

For people of modest means, self-service to their trees is less a matter of choice than of necessity. The surest way for them to avoid mistakes, of omission or commission, is (to repeat): call in a professional. If he is half the man he should be, he will, in appreciation of such paid work as you really need and can afford, be glad to lay out a program for you to follow by yourself, and to see that you follow it. Some of the happiest clients are those who, with several old trees that need skilled attention, have their treeman arrange these in priority order and then budget their therapy piecemeal over the years until all are rehabilitated.

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