I Don't Like Ike.

I visited my mother-in-law in Houston this week. Her trees still reflect the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. After years of careful pruning, and one rather arrogant ligth placed at teh highest possible point, a big storm took out a good bit of this Willow Oak (Q. phellos). She had the debris removed from her garage, along with another Willow Oak that already had a suspicious lean before the storm.

I am sad for the trees, including another Willow Oak in front, which suffered monir damage. The Live Oak (Q. virginiana) and the Water Oak (Q. nigra) appeared to be unharmed.








The worst trees I saw in Houston were not Ike victims, though. My anectdotal evidence (based on a few trips a year for the past 15 years or so) reveals Houston to be much harsher and out-of-date market for tree care. As in Austin, Crape Myrtles (Lagerstroemia indica) take the brunt of the topping. I'm not sure I've seen the crape myrtle in Houston yet that hasn't been topped at least once. But, sadly, other trees get topped, in Houston and everywhere. If you don't know why this is bad, visit ISA's page. The short version is, lopping off a large tree brance midstream takes a huge amount of energy away from the tree, creates a wound that will lead to extensive decay, which will make all the new growth from those topeed stems much weaker thatn the equivalent untopped liibs would have been.

Based on brief forays into trying to sell work to M-I-L's neighbors, I gather the market there is highly underinformed on proper tree care practices. The going rate for this kind of work is not sufficient to do the job right, so it routinely gets done wrong. The abyssmal state of construction protection that exists everywhere is, if anything, worse here. Stripping out the interior of trees ("lion tailing") is common in trees that haven't been topped. Line clearance is brutal (though not as bad as rural topping). Maybe the periodic hurricanes make it difficult to invest in trees there. Maybe I've been running into the wrong people there. But the trees I see in Houston are suffering, and they need an educated populace to demand a higher level of care for their urban forest.

I'll do my best to fix the trees in my M-I-L's yard, but I'm still busy working on Austin as far as the rest of it. I hope some Houstonian tree crusaders are on the rise.