Should I remove or save my northern catalpa?
Northern Catalpa isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Catalpa is the coarse old tree on the back fence line — heart-shaped leaves the size of a hand, orchid-like white flowers in June, and foot-and-a-half seed pods. Most catalpa quotes in central Indiana are cleanup and reduction on a 50-year-old tree that has already dropped a limb or two, because it grows fast, breaks easily, and is structurally spent about the time it gets big enough to matter.
How to tell which one you've got
The one to know is verticillium wilt, which catalpa is highly susceptible to — sudden wilting on one limb or one side of the crown, early defoliation, and brown streaking in the sapwood under the bark of the affected branch. Stress is being stripped bare by catalpa sphinx caterpillars in August and refoliating or simply leafing out fine next spring; dying is one-sided limb death repeating across consecutive years with vascular streaking, and since there is no cure and no effective fungicide, the replant has to be a non-susceptible species.
The structural question
Catalpa has a brittle reputation and the wood earns it, but it actually rides out ice better than that reputation implies — the branching is coarse and open with few, thick twigs, so it accumulates far less glaze load than a fine-twigged birch or willow, and ice-damage surveys generally rank it resistant. Its real failure mode is summer wind on a big-leafed crown combined with decay in old wounds: whole limbs let go at a crotch on a humid, still-feeling day rather than under a January ice load.
Related
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