Post #3841205

2026-07-15 20:23 UTC

After the big storm last week, I was looking out at the yard & noticed that the street trees in front of my house had a lot of dead branches. Since the city is very concerned about monitoring for Dutch elm disease, I sent in a 311 report suggesting they check it out. Got a call today from the friendly helpful city tree biologist. He had been by earlier and had examined the elm trees on the street. They've got some insect infestation (European elm scale), but nothing to worry about. The city has a rotating schedule of treating for them to keep that under control. But the trees I was commenting on? They're not even elm trees. They're ash. The elms are the nice looking ones across the street. I've been living here for 15 years, never noticed that the leaves on these ones were different. I just thought they were stressed & that's why they grew all scraggly. 🤦🏻‍♀️ He agreed they looked stressed, probably spring drought, and that's why there's dead branches & insect damage.

Replies (1)

@AmeliasBrain@mstdn.ca 2026-07-15 20:33

However, he did notice that there was a big broken branch on one of the ash trees. It must have been broken in that storm on the day I took the photo; it's now much more obvious because the leaves are dead. So he thanked me for the report, said glad he was able to catch it before it fell, he's filed a new report with the arborist crew to come clean up. All's well that ends well? 🤷🏻‍♀️ But here I've been hating on elm trees all these years, blaming them for my spring tree allergies, thinking they're over-rated as street trees because they're not always that elegant & the darn branches break in summer storms all the time. And it was ash trees. The trees I hate are green ash trees. I still hate the elms for all the little seedlings I have to yank out of the garden, though. And given that there are half as many elm trees as I thought & they're farther away, man do they make a lot of seeds! Meanwhile, these ash trees must be male: all allergies & no seeds (although there are female ash in the back yards).

Open ##3841460