Cottage Q&A
QUESTIONLast summer at our island on Lake Temagami, we discovered a 1.5-metre-long crack in one of our very tall red pines, starting from the ground up. Sap is coming out near the top, and there are large black ants in the split around the base. Is there anything we can do to extend its life?
ANSWER
If it's very tall, your pine is already a senior citizen. It has a natural lifespan and becomes more vulnerable as it ages. The split, or stress crack, could have happened in a big windstorm. But long before that, internal attacks from a variety of busy wood-decay fungi will have been gradually hollowing out the lower trunk, or butt, and weakening its structure. Your ants sound like carpenter ants, attracted to the moist, soft decayed wood inside, which is easy for them to excavate. The sap and the ants are just symptoms, though.
An arborist might decide to drill through the trunk and insert a bracing rod, with washers at either end, to help hold it together. But with internal rot and a big split, this is really just a temporary solution. The tree is past its prime and our experts agreed that probably your best option is to leave it alone. Since the most vital part of the tree is its sapwood - the wood nearest the bark - it could live for a while yet, perhaps as long as 30 years.
Or it could blow down in the next big windstorm. Only you can decide whether it's a danger to buildings, power lines, or people. If it's not, let it stand. Dead or alive, upright or on the ground, a large old tree is food and habitat for a wide variety of desirable critters, and you'll have the pleasure of seeing them go about their business. And consider some advice from forestry consultant King Wright of King's Forestry Service: If most of your pines are mature, plant some shade-tolerant young ones to replace them - the sooner the better.
* Published in the June 2005 issue of Cottage Life
