Tree Cabling And Bracing In St. George, Ontario

The Trees Tree Cabling And Bracing Applies To Around Here

Mature sugar maple is the tree this comes up on most in St. George — usually a specimen planted a century ago in a garden that was rural at the time, now surrounded by a village.

Those trees frequently carry two or three stems out of one point low down. Where stems of similar size grow pressed together they never knit; the bark on their facing surfaces is rolled inward instead, and so what presents as a fork is bark right through the centre, with nothing structural bridging the two sides.

Look for a narrow V where you would want a broad U, frequently with a ridge of bark running down out of the fork. On any large multi-stemmed tree here, assume that until somebody has climbed it and looked.

What Tree Cabling And Bracing Actually Does

A cable is flexible. It does not hold the tree together and it is not a repair — it limits how far the two halves can move apart in a gust, which keeps the stress at the union inside what the remaining wood can carry.

The brace half of tree cabling and bracing is a rigid rod through the union itself, there to stop the halves separating while the cable above restrains the tops. Where the bark inclusion is severe, fit the pair.

Height matters: roughly two-thirds of the distance between the union and the limb tips. Below that there is insufficient leverage; above it, the timber is too slender to carry an anchor.

Four Questions Before Any Tree Cabling And Bracing Goes In

Is this tree actually worth the money — old enough to matter, sound, casting shade you would miss, and not something a decade of growth would replace?

Is the fault in the crown rather than the base? Tree cabling and bracing does nothing whatsoever for a decayed butt, and fitting it to one is close to negligent.

Is there solid timber on both sides of the fork? An anchor in decayed wood tears out under load and takes a slab of the stem with it, which is worse than no cable.

Is there something underneath worth the money? Over a house, a drive or a patio the arithmetic works. In the middle of a paddock it usually does not.

Tree Cabling And Bracing Is A Commitment, Not A Purchase

This is the part that gets left out of quotes elsewhere. Tree cabling and bracing is not fit-and-forget.

Hardware wears. Trees grow around anchors and over them. Left unlooked-at for fifteen years it stops being a support system and becomes a length of steel sitting in a tree. A cable that lets go can do more harm than one that was never fitted, because by then the tree has grown into a shape that assumed it was there.

So a cable comes with an inspection interval, and we will tell you what it is and when we expect to be back. We are through South Dumfries most weeks, so coming back to inspect one costs nobody an extra journey.

What We Will Tell You Not To Do

If a union has already split substantially, a cable alone is generally too late. A rod driven through the fork with a cable set above it does occasionally hold. Now and then the truthful answer is tree removal, and you will hear it from us.

Dying or dead ash rules itself out at any price. Brittle wood does not retain an anchor.

And if the only argument for keeping it is that removal looks expensive, do the sums including the inspections. Sometimes cabling wins. Often it does not, and you deserve to hear that before you pay for it.