Cottage Q&A

QUESTION
When I arrived at my cottage last spring, I found a half-toppled pine tree that had been growing in a pad of soil on bare rock. I tried to fell it completely but it wouldn't budge. A few weeks later, I returned to find it standing upright, and it stayed that way all summer. How on earth did this happen? Will it survive?

Michelle Dionne, Go Home Lake, Ont.


ANSWER
Steven Mann, a local manager at Bartlett Tree Experts in Bracebridge, Ont., says the pine likely first toppled because of sustained rain and high winds. The soil around root systems loosens when it's heavily saturated, and a pine tree's year-round foliage catches the wind and makes it more susceptible to tipping. Bill Parker, a research scientist at the Ontario Forest Research Institute in Sault Ste. Marie, speculates that "a significant portion of the pine's root system has penetrated a deep seam in the rock containing a vein of soil and this is why the tree only partly toppled and remained healthy." Parker says there is nothing "physiologically" the tree could have done to right itself and it was probably due to what he jokingly calls "a perfect storm": winds coming from the optimum direction to push the pine back into place. In essence, the heavy root system allowed the tree to wobble back and forth like a Weeble. The bad news, according to Mann, is that if it failed once, it will likely fail again. If the tree is in a high-traffic area or could fall on the cottage, the safest thing is to cut it down. (Click here for an article on how to fell trees.)

Steve Brearton



* Published in the September/October 2006 issue of Cottage Life