How long can I leave this tree's never been pruned and it's out of control before it becomes dangerous?
Watch, on a season-to-year timeline — with one exception to check today. Walk under it and look up: any dead limb thicker than your arm suspended over a deck, patio, driveway, play area, or a path you use daily is a days-timeline item no matter how healthy the rest of the tree looks, because dead wood comes down on calm afternoons with no warning. Everything else waits for scheduled pruning. What changes while you wait is that overextended limbs gain weight and their unions carry more load each year, and an ignored weak union fails during a storm rather than during an inspection — in this climate, a summer straight-line wind or a winter ice load.
Whether it can still be saved
Yes, and this is the best value in tree work — but it takes more than one visit. The right first job removes deadwood over targets, establishes clearances, and reduces end weight on the most overextended limbs; it does not try to fix twenty years in a day. Standard practice caps live-tissue removal near a quarter of the crown in a season, and on a mature neglected tree a good arborist takes less than that and returns. Where a codominant union has included bark, the choices are subordinating one stem across successive prunings, installing a cable or brace, or removing one stem — decided by size and by what is underneath. Refuse topping, refuse lion-tailing (stripping interior growth and leaving tufts at the tips, which makes leverage worse), and refuse anyone quoting to take half the tree.
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