A Beloved Maple Tree Had to Come Down, But It Lives On

When you live a long time with trees, they become a part of you.

So it pained me to take down the old sugar maple, my arboreal cathedral, one rafter at a time, her demise not from flames but an underground blaze of fungus.

Small honey-colored mushrooms fruiting at her base were “the giveaway,” said the forester.

The tree was old when we moved to the farm 36 years ago, about the age of this farmhouse we figured, 160 years. I know she was here as far back as the 1940s because we have a photo of her in her younger days, much smaller and not quite ruling over the side yard as she did in her later years.

In her old age, she reached about 90 feet high. And she was a tree with a personality. Not straight and narrow, but quirky, with a trunk that had split into four and branches that splayed this way and that, coping with aging as best she could. I felt privileged to have lived under her canopy for many years.

But lately she’s been battered by torrential rains, and then drought. Summers are hotter, winters aren’t as cold. She’s had little snow cover to insulate her roots. Climate change probably made her more susceptible to the fungus, armillaria, the forester said.

And she’s not the only tree stressed on the farm. Ash trees have been decimated by the emerald ash borer. Native dogwoods are dying of anthracnose. Hemlocks are being attacked by the hemlock woolly adelgid and spicebush and sassafras are suffering from laurel wilt, spread by the nonnative ambrosia beetle. Woods that were once woods are becoming fields again.

We watched the old maple die slowly. She’s not doing well, my husband and I said to each other.

Then, in one season, her entire left side started coming down. Limbs crashed onto the springhouse below, chunks of bark everywhere. Anthills appeared at her base. Vegetation that had lodged high in her crevices looked less vigorous to me.