I always make a trip through to shake off heavy snow loads that could damage my cultivars.

I have found that if left to melt and then refreeze that causes the foliage to take a set. When that happens you never regain the be-fore-hand look.

Always wrap your Arbs with twine or stretch tape so they don't splay open under heavy snow or ice loads.

Dave

i would brush it off also.. VERY CAREFULLY ....

you do not need it totally off ... and you must not cause damage.. like breaking off growth points or snapping frozen branches ...

they will pop right back into shape when it warms enough ...

if you want to experiment.. clean one.. leave the other ... and report back

ken

If it splays open under the weight parts of it may remain that way after the thaw or even split off beforehand. Better to take the weight off.

One unloaded its load this morning. The other was a little better. The wife made a funny face when I started towards it to brush the fella off with the soft end of the car ice scraper. I will see how it is later and attend to it.

Is this a pretty common problem with the arbs as they get larger? My sunkist has been thinned by deer so no leaning over yet out of it. Dont ppl plant these as windbreaks where the trees are expexted to get thirty feet tall?

>Is this a pretty common problem with the arbs as they get larger?Your wife making faces?

Yes, columnar forms in particular may open up like flowers some years, under the right conditions - even here in USDA 8. Pruning manuals etc. often contain tips on how to strap those that can be saved back together.

Contrast all this with the straight species like in my woods. Last year, many young trees were bent right to the ground under snow load. With acres of these trees to deal with, I'm not out there shaking snow off! Nor need I be. This species developed to withstand heavy snow, long before any of us were around to notice.

The species can form multiple leaders. It can, when tipped by the wind, form new vertical leaders out of what had been side branches. But its main form is to be a single-leader tree, not unlike a spruce or fir in general structure.

But yeah, some of those cultivars will open up like an over-ripe banana. And true also, some of the distortions caused by being weighted down for long periods by ice and snow can permanently change the orientation of individual stems.

+oM

Theres a stand of T.plicata near the school, complete with brown cones. My tree book doesnt show the cones of T.occidentalis tho, are they similar?

The outermost scales of the eastern species are nearly as long as the center of the cone. With the western species the scales appear to be just about all the same size, with the outermost ones not reaching to near the tip of the cone at all.

We've been slammed with snow in MN. The first big heavy wet snow was snapping off 5" white pine limbs. I shook off my arbos with that snowfall. Just yesterday I also used a wooden pole to gently knock off some of the heavier loads from them which had accumilated from the last several snowfalls. Man, did that pole smell good!!

Large arbos frequently need to be tied with nylon webbing once they get bigger and have seen a few heavy snow winters. This is especially true if you plan on shaping them.