Should I remove or save my black cherry?
Black Cherry isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Nobody plants it — birds do. It arrives in fence lines, back corners, and along privacy screens and goes unnoticed until it is 40 ft over the neighbor's garage, and because it is one of the most ice-vulnerable hardwoods growing here, it turns into a quote after almost every ice event.
How to tell which one you've got
Black knot is the signature: elongated black swellings that look like burnt sausage wrapped around twigs and branches, girdling and killing everything beyond them one limb at a time. Distinguish that slow limb-by-limb loss from actual structural failure — bark sloughing in patches off the main stem, gumming or sawdust at the base, and a crown thin everywhere at once means the tree is finished, not merely infected.
The structural question
Listed as susceptible in the urban ice-storm tables and repeatedly named across multiple ice-storm studies as one of the worst performers of any eastern hardwood, because the wood is brittle and it drops whole scaffold limbs under load. In central Indiana that makes black cherry one of the first species on the ground after a quarter-inch ice accumulation, and it typically tears out at a branch union rather than breaking mid-limb.
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