For Release March 6, 2005

The Diary

AGRI-VIEWS
by Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent

I have a friend in Wichita whom I provide electronic County Agent support to. She e-mails me pictures or questions and I supply her with my professional opinion. She has a silver maple tree in her front yard by her driveway. It's probably as old as the house, roughly 20 years. A wind storm last summer took a few limbs out of it and she had it trimmed up by an arborist.

Well, the ice storm that they had a few months ago took down half the tree. This silver maple had done the typical maple thing, branching out low with a narrow branch angle. This led to the ice storm splitting half the tree and laying it across her driveway. She told me of this and her plan to just have the whole tree taken down. I asked her to take pictures when this happened, I wanted to see the cross section of the stump and any other cross sections higher up.

The digital images arrived early last week. If half of the tree had not broken in the ice storm, it would have come down sometime soon. The tree was already rotting up through the center. Some parts of the center of the tree were in that early pre rot stage and had suffered from either carpenter ants or termites, I suspect termites. It was very obvious that the last couple of years the tree had been given good care because the outer two growth rings were quite substantial.

But as you counted growth rings back about four or five years, there was a thin black line that had wood in good condition outside of that line and discolored brown wood inside of this line. Something bad had happened to that tree about four or five years ago. A quick e-mail to my friend confirmed that just prior to her purchasing the house in the fall of 2000, a severe wind storm had caused a lot of damage that required quite a bit of pruning.

That thin black line that was created by the tree was a series of cells that attempt to seal off the damaged portions of the tree from the newer, healthier wood. The shock was so great from the wind storm damage, that it had killed a large portion of the inside of the tree. New wood outside of that line showed normal healthy color and the tree was trying to produce as much new wood as it could to compensate for the dying inner portion of the tree. Even without the ice storm, the tree was already dying.

That cut stump and those cross section photographs were a diary. A diary of every event in that tree's life. One portion showed where the tree had been barked and then callous tissue had grown around and over the injury, yet another episode in that tree's life. I've gotten to count tree rings of freshly cut trees that were over 200 years old. You could see droughts and floods, lightning strikes and possibly the sudden loss of a competitive tree that allowed one side to put on much more rapid growth than the other side of the tree. The whole life of that tree was laid out before me, just like reading someone's diary.

Everything you do to the trees in your yard is recorded within that tree. The four years of drought we've just experienced will be obvious, although maybe not as obvious if you watered that tree well. You can probably see when it was transplanted, the transplant shock for the next few years and then the rapid growth after it re-acclimated. You may even find evidence of the tire swing that was hung in the tree or the time someone used the tree trunk for batting practice.

So take care of those trees. Treat them well and keep them healthy. Because you never know when someone might come along and start reading that diary.

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