Should I remove or save my japanese maple?
Japanese Maple isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Pound for pound the most valuable tree on most central Indiana properties, and it is nearly always within 15 ft of the house, which makes it the tree people pay for careful work on and the one you never take down casually. Morton also notes that not all cultivars are fully hardy in zone 5, and central Indiana sits close enough to that line that winter injury is a genuine part of the picture.
How to tell which one you've got
Verticillium wilt is the one that kills — a single limb or one whole side wilts and dies while the rest of the tree looks untouched, and peeling bark on a dying branch shows dark olive streaking in the sapwood. Leaf scorch is the one that does not: crispy brown leaf margins across the whole canopy in July and August from sun, wind, or dry soil, which is ugly but survivable, and the same goes for a late-April freeze browning the first flush, which it re-leafs from.
The structural question
It is small and low enough that whole-tree failure is rare; the damaging event is a multi-stem or grafted specimen splitting at a tight, included-bark union under ice and losing half its value in one night. Fine, twiggy laceleaf and weeping forms accumulate a disproportionate ice load for their branch diameter, which is why cabling a mature specimen is genuinely worth doing here.
Related
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