Should I remove or save my ohio buckeye?
Ohio Buckeye isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Ohio buckeye is the first tree in central Indiana to leaf out in spring and the first to look dead — by August most of them here are brown and half-defoliated from leaf blotch and marginal scorch. That cosmetic collapse, not risk, is what puts buckeye on a removal quote; structurally the tree is usually fine underneath.
How to tell which one you've got
Nearly everything that looks fatal on a central Indiana buckeye isn't — blotch browning spreading from the interior outward, scorched leaf margins on the sun side, and bare branches by late August are annual events on a healthy tree. Genuine decline is branch-by-branch: twigs that fail to break bud at all the following May, thinning from the top down, and cankers or bleeding at the trunk.
The structural question
Buckeye wood is soft, low-density and weak for its diameter, but the tree is short and broad enough that it never develops the leverage that snaps big-limbed maples in an ice storm. What you actually get is scattered small-limb breakage and, on open-grown yard trees, splits at the low codominant forks the species tends to form.
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