Is my tulip poplar safe in a storm?
Rated intermediate for ice-storm susceptibility, so it is not the first species on the ground after a quarter-inch event — but when it does fail, it fails large, because a limb breaking 70 ft up is several hundred pounds with a long drop. In central Indiana the bigger wind risk is whole-tree lean or uprooting, since a shallow root plate in saturated clay after several days of rain has very little left to hold.
What pruning can and can't prevent
Prune dormant, in late winter, and prune it young — the entire job is establishing one central leader and cutting out codominant stems while they are still 2 to 3 inches, because a tuliptree that loses its leader regrows a cluster of weakly attached upright shoots that fail 20 years later. The species-specific trap is waiting: large cuts on a mature tuliptree close slowly and poorly, so structural pruning at 15 years is cheap and structural pruning at 50 years is just decay you paid for.
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