Wind-Battered Gardens

May 30th, 2011

   Extreme weather gave us another punch this past week – this time near-hurricane winds with a selection of tornado touchdowns.

One of the many big trees that blew over at Silver Spring Presbyterian Church.

   Here’s hoping you’re not one of those who had cars flattened, roofs blown off or worse.

   This was the scariest storm I’ve ever seen.

   I live in Cumberland County, not far from where some of the worst damage happened. The skies got eerily dark, wind was blowing trees sideways, and updrafts were picking up objects and tossing them down streets. It looked tornado-ish.

   The Silver Spring Presbyterian Church grounds along Silver Spring Road took some of the most brutal beating when a tornado apparently did touch down.

   Towering, centuries-old oaks were knocked over like giant dominoes. One broke apart a section of cemetery wall as it fell, and a couple of others landed on a power line, snapping off the two poles on either end like mere toothpicks.

   Most of the time, when electricity goes out in a storm like this (which it did over a wide area), it’s because trees topple onto power lines.

   The trend toward buried lines cuts down on this problem. But in areas where lines are above ground, it’s so important to avoid planting trees under or near them.

   This is why utility companies spend much time and money going around pruning (butchering is often a better description) street trees that pose blow-down and limb-drop threats to power lines.

   In the landscape, this storm was bad enough to cause lots of plant damage.

   Broken tree limbs were a big one. Make clean cuts back to joints (i.e. no stubs) where branches got ripped off.

   Don’t go up on a ladder with a chainsaw. If you can’t reach limbs from the ground, hire a pro.

   That’s what I’m going to do to clean up a few oak limbs that are broken high up. Tree companies have younger folks who have the training and safety equipment.

   I was able to prune off several lower limbs, including a wrist-sized dogwood branch that was twisted and mangled as if the swirling wind gave it a wrestler’s full nelson. Never saw that kind of break…

A split like this may be salvageable by bolting the pieces back together.

   Branches that are split apart might be able to be salvaged.

   On my Douglas fir, the wind took a branch 2 feet high and split it at a joint. If I pruned it off back to the trunk, it would’ve left a pretty noticeable gaping hole in this 20-foot beauty.

   So I drilled holes and bolted the split parts back together. With any luck, the wood will fuse together, and the branch will be saved.

   The key to this kind of repair is getting to it as soon as possible. Once wood starts to dry and callous, it’s much less likely to grow back together.

   The violent winds gusted enough to snap even a lot of shrub branches. That hardly ever happens because shrub branches are generally shorter, more compact and have smaller leaves than most trees (less of a “sail effect”). They’re also lower to the ground.

   In my yard, I had snapped branches on roses, elderberry and hydrangea.

   Tall perennials such as lilies, yarrow and centaurea got blown over, and vines such as clematis and honeysuckle got blown off of trellises. Even my ‘Moonlight’ Japanese hydrangea vine – with its tightly grabbing tentacles – got torn off a brick wall.

   If you’ve got any of that damage, here’s what to do:

• Gently straighten and tamp leaning plants so they’re upright and re-secured. You may need to add stakes to some of them.
• For bent and snapped shrub branches, there’s not much you can do to salvage them. You’ll just have to prune off the damage back to the next intact joint and wait for new growth to improve mangled looks.
• For vines, carefully secure them back to trellises. If you can’t wrap them without doing damage, it’s better to use a soft tie to pull them back up. For sucking vines, either prune off any “hangers” or use twisty ties to pull them up and give them a chance to re-sucker. You may need to drill holes to add wall support for the ties, which is why I just decided to prune off the sections of my hydrangea vine that got blown off.
• And above all, call a tree company immediately if you’ve got leaning trees or have large hanging branches that could still fall on people, pets, cars or structures. Branches left dangling are going to fall off at some point.