I have done a lot of warning about dangerous trees. I have found that individual property owners usually take action. The tree department in D.C. never heeded any of my warnings. One tree I warned them about was a really large sugar maple growing in the Georgetown section. It had some ugly fungal fruiting bodies coming out of the base. Within a year or two it crashed down. I did not see the immediate result. I don't think any of the buildings were damaged, but I bet a lot of cars parked on the street were destroyed. Do what you can to alert the proper authorities, and maybe the homeowners on the street. You may save a life and/or some valuable property. --Spruce

Hi chowdry I would love some seeds for the sugar maple please. We have lost a whole acre of trees due to emerald ash borer and need to reolace with another type of tree. This woul d be a huge help. Please contact me If you have any left to share please. Thanks so much ! Signet

Depends on MANY factors. In a tightly controlled environment such as a nursery pot, where you can control rootball size (pot size), water, and fertilizer, you could get 3'-4'+ of growth. The hard part of pushing them that hard is the new growth may not harden off completely. A foot of growth would be for a reasonably healthy landscape tree in a lawn without extra watering and fairly nutrient poor soil. Stressed trees would grow less but most young Sugar Maples would do 1'-2', occasionally more in ideal locations.

What you are saying makes sense to me +oM about the thinning of trees and that they "will fight you back if you try to change that ratio too much." And I see that you understand exactly what I mean when you said that you had a large silver maple in your backyard and that the "hostas grew a little each year.....smaller, that is! So that is an issue." Absolutely, right on! That has happened in my backyard with almost everything I have tried to grow. Also, if I think about adding raised beds, my husband says that I am blocking the drainage flow. And if I were to remove my grass and add spin out material, that would be expensive and would perhaps damage the root system of these Sugar Maples. Seems like I can't win. So my solution has been to use pots. Now for certified arborist #2 who came today. He stated first of all that he was not able to do any thinning for us due to the proximity of our hydro wires. He said that I would have to get a company that had a special permit to do this and said that I needed to ask whether that company was insured. He said that since he was here anyways, he would answer questions that I had. Question #1: What are the chances that the city would allow me to cut down one tree? Answer: He said it was hard to say because the city has granted approval to cut trees that he thought they never would. If they did allow one of these trees to be removed, then he thought they would require one or maybe even two to be planted as replacements. I forgot to ask about the crown dying on one of them. Darn!!! Question #2: Can these maples be trimmed and thinned out? Answer: Now this was the interesting part for me. He said that there were some dead branches to be removed and that a bit of thinning could be done. But he also said that each of these trees had a water sprout---I had never heard of that before---and that those could be removed and would probably allow a bit more sunlight into the yard. So I googled water sprout and took some pictures for you to see. Do you really think that removal of this water sprout would be a good idea? It's not that small of a branch anymore. Here is Tree #1. The water sprout is the limb on the right. Tree #2. The water sprout is the limb on the right. I would love to hear some comments!