Answered for Bargersville, Johnson County.
The shelf is a fruiting body — the reproductive structure. The organism has been living inside the wood digesting it long before anything appeared on the outside. So the shelf is not the problem, it is the announcement. The practical translation is that there is a volume of decayed wood inside the trunk or the root collar, and the real job is establishing how much sound wood remains around it and whether that remaining shell is enough to hold the tree up. In Bargersville — Saddle Club, Kerrington Proper and Whitetail Woods included, that's normally a hazardous tree removal job at $800–$5,000. Within weeks.
NWS Indianapolis records 23 tornadoes in Johnson County between 1950 and 2025, with none touching Bargersville itself. The nearest significant hits: an EF3 at New Whiteland on March 31, 2023 ($6.67M), the F3 that crossed Greenwood on September 20, 2002 ($25M), and an F2 at Greenwood on March 31, 2006 ($3.0M). The June 2008 flood was a county-wide event.
No street tree inventory exists for Bargersville and it is not among the 23 communities in the Indiana DNR street tree sample, so the picture is an expectation from the build-out pattern: most of the canopy should be nursery stock roughly five to twenty-five years old, not yet over the roofline, with mature shade trees concentrated in Old Bargersville, Three Notch Village and the few pre-war properties. The UDC's Approved Plant List steers new planting toward natives and flags which species may go under utility lines, though the list's contents are unverified.
No permit is required for a homeowner to take down a tree in their own yard — the UDC's landscape standards do not reach detached single-family and two-family dwellings outside a subdivision. Subdivision, commercial and new-development sites are subject to those standards, which are reported to include plotting existing trees above a caliper threshold as "To Be Removed" or "To Be Saved," an Approved Plant List and a Prohibited Plant List, a prohibition on topping, and separately enforceable recorded Tree Preservation Easements. Those provisions could not be verified against the adopted UDC text — in particular whether the prohibited list names American elm or only Siberian elm — so confirm with the Town before quoting development-site work.
Not settled in the town code. The UDC requires street trees to be shown within the platted street right-of-way on construction plans, and makes the property owner responsible for maintaining, repairing and replacing required landscaping — but no section I could find assigns ownership of the strip itself. Confirm with the Town before removing a curb-strip tree.
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Distance measured from Bargersville.