Should I remove or save my eastern white pine?
Eastern White Pine isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. It gets planted constantly here and the soil does not want it — Purdue documents "white pine decline" specifically as an Indiana clay-soil disorder, where trees look fine for fifteen or twenty years and then quit. Most white pine calls are either that slow unexplained fade or a storm-broken top.
How to tell which one you've got
It presents as off-color first — pale to yellow-green next to a healthy neighbor — then progressively shorter needles, shorter annual twig extension, and wrinkled bark on the branches before anything browns. Stress versus dying: a tree that yellows and greens back up in a wet year is stressed, but once annual candle growth is down to a couple of inches, needle retention has dropped to the current year only, and branch bark has shriveled, it is finished.
The structural question
Structurally the worst of the common Indiana conifers under ice — soft brittle limb wood on long horizontal branches arranged in distinct whorls, so limbs snap a few feet out from the trunk and cascade down through the tree, stripping one whole side. Tops break out regularly as well, and a white pine leaning over a roof or a driveway is the conifer most likely to actually put something through it.
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