Tree Service in Maplewood, WA

Bigleaf maple is the native one, and on a residential lot it is the biggest tree most people will ever own. Beside it sit the planted maples — Norway, red, the occasional silver — that went in as shade trees when these blocks filled out. They all share one habit: they grow wide before they grow strong, and they build the shape of their whole future in the first fifteen years while nobody is watching.

That is why a maple failure almost never looks like a fir failure. The root plate stays put. The trunk stays put. What lets go is a limb or a whole stem, and it takes the fence, the gutter or the car with it.

The Fork Is the Problem, Not the Trunk

Look at where your maple divides. If two stems of roughly equal size leave the trunk in a tight V, there is a good chance bark is trapped down inside that seam instead of wood growing across it. From the ground the union looks solid, because the outside of it is smooth and swollen. There is far less holding it together than the diameter suggests.

The things worth checking with binoculars: a vertical crack or a dark weeping line running down out of the crotch, a raised ridge of bark where the two stems meet, and whether the stems move independently of each other on a windy afternoon. Any of those is a reason to call before the weather does the deciding.

A Maple Cut in February Will Bleed at You

Maples run sap hard in late winter, and pruning cuts made then weep for weeks. It rarely kills a healthy tree, but it is messy, it draws insects, and it is not the window we would pick. Summer, once the leaves have hardened off, or the back end of autumn are both better on a maple. Storm damage is the exception — a torn limb gets cleaned up whenever it happens.

What we are usually doing up there is taking weight off the ends of the long limbs and clearing out the dead, not shortening the tree. Topping a maple gets you a flush of weakly attached shoots that will be the next thing to fail, on a tree that is now uglier and more expensive to maintain.

Roots, Driveway Aprons and the Strip of Lawn

Maple roots run shallow and they run far, which on a mid-century lot with compacted subgrade under the lawn means they travel right along the surface. That is how a driveway apron cracks, a walkway panel tips, and a mower blade finds something it should not. Grinding a stump close to concrete needs the same care — we want to see where the grinder can reach before we promise anything.

• End-weight reduction and deadwood removal on bigleaf maples overhanging roofs and fences
• Cabling a codominant union on a tree that is worth keeping rather than removing
• Cleanup and repair pruning after a stem has torn out under snow load
• Removing declining Norway and silver maples that are past repairing
• Stump grinding tight to driveways, walkways and foundation lines
• Photo documentation of storm damage for an insurance claim