Should I remove or save my eastern red cedar?
Eastern Red Cedar isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. It is native here and it plants itself — birds drop seed in fencerows, along drives, and in any corner that stopped getting mowed, so most red cedar quotes start with "this thing appeared and now it's 25 feet tall against the garage." The second driver is cedar-apple rust: red cedar is the alternate host, so anyone with apples or crabapples eventually wants the cedar gone.
How to tell which one you've got
True decline here is site-driven — standing water in stripped-topsoil lots, or concrete poured over the root plate — and shows as whole-branch flagging, where an entire limb browns at once rather than the crown thinning evenly. Interior needle browning and shed each fall is normal seasonal drop, and rust galls are cosmetic to the cedar itself; bagworm is the one that actually kills, because a branch stripped bare by bagworms will never refoliate.
The structural question
One of the better conifers under Indiana ice — tough flexible wood on a narrow dense crown over a deep root system, so it bends and sheds load instead of snapping at the trunk. The exception is multi-stemmed specimens that forked low: ice splays the stems outward, the union tears, and once splayed the tree never closes back up.
Related
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