mdo, I can shed a little light on this: With the Emamectin Benzoate-style treatments available now, tradenamed Tree-age (The 'a' has the two little umlauts or whatever they're called above it, and the word is pronounced like the word triage), it is reasonable to expect two solid years of control from a single treatment, and quite possibly three years. For high-value trees like yours, this seems like a reasonable thing to do. Alternatively, the Imidacloprid insecticides will give a single year's control but are easier to apply. So even that's not a crazy thing to do. Environmentally speaking, either one of these methods is fairly low risk to surrounding organisms, being either injected straight into the trunk, or spread on the ground and soaked in via watering or rainfall, depending on which chemistry you reach for. The other half of your question I can answer too: What seems to happen with EAB is similar to other exotic insect invasions-there is a ramping up period, a period of overwhelming infestation, and then, just as you'd probably expect,a leveling off period after the insects have killed most of their hosts. So if you do happen to save yours during the hot time, you would still need to treat to have the surety of protecting the trees, but overall pressure would level off a great deal. These two lines of thought are straight out of very recent arborist's convention/seminars, so they are up to date. The relevance of this winter's cold temps was also a hot topic (Buh dum bum), but in reality, most thought is that while some of the less-deeply positioned larvae may indeed be killed, EAB has two larval forms and one of them is positioned deeper into the trunk, likely meaning the weather will have fairly little impact one way or the other. We can always hope though! +oM

David - We get some nasty storms, especially in winter. We get storms with 70km sustained winds and 90km gusts off of the lake in the summer. Ive seen snow loads snap pine/spruce branches. Sure we arent tornado ally, but we get nasty storms. We are susceptible to weather bombs and wind sheer coming off of the lake. We have also gotten hit by remnants of hurricaines. We got nailed with the rest of katrina. Not as bad as toronto did mind you. I can see similarities between the tree im looking at and black poplar. The leaves are very close. The only thing I can see different is the growth habit from pictures. Black poplar seems to have a habit somewhat similar to ash, with upright branches. This tree as you can see in the last picture has weeping branches (which is why i was thinking willow). The first picture reminds me somewhat of an elm, at least in shape. I cant find any poplar that looks like that.

Hi Bboy, Famartin, Jqpublic, and Wisconsinitom, I'm not surprised that the sugar maple can make it to 500 years in ideal conditions. The person who has been hauling away the lumber from our tree has found an iron peg, and today a nail (with his chainsaw, unfortunately), revealing a glimpse into a history we can only guess at. But we have stands of native sugar maples all around Ontario and throughout Quebec and New Brunswick. It is a ubiquitous tree here. The "sugar bush", and the "sugar shack" (where the sap is boiled down) are common expressions here. The Mennonites and many other farmers and chefs tap the trees in the spring. Municipalities and cities often extend special agreements to allow farmers to tap the trees on city or regional land. Maple syrup is a huge commodity here with maple syrup festivals every spring. This year the sap was running earlier than usual. Jqpublic, I do have photos of the trees in the Fall, but I'll have to find them and post them online before I can publish them here. They are indeed majestic. Ours tend to yellow, and yellow/orange. Here's a tiny glimpse from my studio of the one we cut down (never to be seen again):

Now that my memory has been jogged...I remember Kenny! I'm so happy he's doing SO well! Sounds like he has a pretty good life going!*S* Anyone here that wants to send a card, please do. I'm sure it would thrill them. I thought I'd deleted that part, because I didn't want anyone to think I was posting the update to get them to send cards.