Shiver me timbers

Last Tuesday, Hampton Roads was hit by a nasty band of thunderstorms with winds gusting to 80 mph – enough to blow over two tractor-trailers on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, as well as knock out power to 150,000 houses and take down trees all over the place. Whole thing lasted no more than 20 minutes.

I was fortunate. Didn't lose power at all (7500 people were still without power nearly 48 hours later), and only a few small branches got blown off the Bradford pear in my front yard, which really surprised me given the tendency of Bradford pears to come apart in high winds.

Alas, I was in for another surprise. in a remarkable display of delayed reaction, the tree apparently decided to wait through four days of unremarkable weather before making up its mind to abruptly drop a couple of major limbs to the ground as I watched. I had just returned from Lowe's and was transferring 18 petunias from the cargo area of my car to the driveway in front of the garage, when I heard an odd cracking noise and turned to watch the limbs fall off into my neighbor's yard.

It could have been a lot worse. As you can see in the photo above, my neighbor parks his pickup truck on the street under the shade of that Bradford pear. If the limb that shades the truck had been the one to let go - well, I think you can see my point. (And if I were he, I would definitely be having second thoughts about the desirability of that parking space. Heck, he was just saying to me the other day – before the storm – that he was surprised that tree was still standing. Most of the Bradford pears in the neighborhood are long gone.) Aside from that, the branches just missed one of the three decorative cherry trees he planted in his front yard a couple of weeks ago.

The trouble with Bradford pears is that they tend to have weak, narrow crotch angles that split apart from the weight of the limb. That's what happened here; in the photo below right (taken after I cut the branches off the limb and it completed its separation from the trunk), you can see the bark trapped in the crotch that made it so weak. That was about a 4-inch diameter limb.

This doesn't explain why the other, smaller limb (shown below) broke, though it's possible that its outer branches were entwined with those of the larger limb, and when that collapsed the weight simply snapped the other limb.

By the way, I just had this tree heavily pruned last year (technically, they "raised the crown") because it was overhanging the roof, the driveway, and my neighbor's yard so far. In fact, I was concerned after they were done that they might have taken too much off. But now I'm glad they pruned it so zealously; had they left more behind, I fear this storm would have deposited it on my roof and car.