Is my hackberry dying or just stressed?
Hackberry looks worse than it is for most of the summer, so separating cosmetic damage from real decline is the entire job here. Nipple galls (small raised bumps on the leaf undersides from a psyllid), witches' broom and leaf spotting are all disfiguring and all harmless — real decline is upper-crown dieback with progressively smaller leaves and thinning twigs, and the usual causes in this region are mower and string-trimmer wounds on thin young bark, or old storm breaks that opened a decay column.
Why hackberry ends up on a quote here
The tough one — hackberry shrugs off compacted clay, alkaline soil, road salt, drought, wind and short-term flooding, which is precisely why it has been planted so heavily as an ash replacement across central Indiana. The part nobody mentions at planting time is that it was one of the most ice-damaged species in the ISA's ice-storm survey, so the trade for that site tolerance is recurring storm calls.
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