Is my tree leans, but it's always leaned an emergency?
Not urgent. Lean alone is a poor predictor of failure, and an old lean is often evidence of the opposite. A tree that leaned slowly over years has been laying reaction wood on the loaded side the whole time and thickening its root plate to match — it has already engineered around the load. What actually predicts uprooting is root-plate movement, and root-plate movement shows up in the ground, not in the trunk angle. That is why the soil around the base tells you more than the lean does.
What changes while you wait
Watch — this is a years-long observation, and the way to do it is to make the lean measurable instead of remembered. Drive a stake at the base, sight the trunk against a fixed vertical from a marked standing spot, and photograph it from that same spot each spring. A lean that has not moved in a decade is the strongest reassurance available. Escalate to same-day if you find fresh soil cracking or a raised mound on the tension side, roots visibly lifting, a lean that increased after a storm or a saturated spell, or fungal conks at the base — lean plus root decay is a materially more serious combination than either finding alone.
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