Walked through an old arboretum in Portland and noticed something about the trees

I was visiting the Hoyt Arboretum last Saturday, just wandering around on a day off. There's this section with these massive old oaks, probably planted like 80 years ago. What caught me was how some of them had these huge, heavy limbs that were barely hanging on, and you could see where they'd had cable supports put in decades back that were now totally buried in the bark. It made me think about how we sometimes put band-aids on trees instead of just making the hard call to prune or remove something. I saw one limb that must have weighed 2,000 pounds just resting on a rusted cable that looked 40 years old. Has anyone else seen old cabling jobs that are way past their useful life but still in place?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan2714d ago

The real problem isn't just the rusted cables, it's how arborists back then were trained differently. They treated cabling like a permanent fix, but modern tree work knows those supports need replacing every 10-15 years tops. That 40 year old cable you saw is basically a ticking time bomb. If that limb comes down in a storm, it could split the whole tree in half because the bark has grown around the cable and made it part of the structure. Trees aren't static things, they grow and shift, so that old cable is now pulling in a direction the tree wasn't designed for. It's almost like we gave the tree a bad prosthetic leg and just left it there.

brooke_murray4d ago

Read somewhere that some old cables actually get completely absorbed into the tree's wood over time, so you basically cant remove them without hurting the tree. Its wild cause the tree just kept growing around the hardware like it wasnt even there. Makes you wonder how many trees out there are just holding it together with ancient rusty wire acting like a permanent bandaid.

thomas.river4d ago

Isn't that more of a "back then vs now" training gap than the cables themselves being the issue?