Most of the driveway trees we take down didn't fail overnight. They spent three or four years telling anybody who looked. The signs are just boring — a seam in the bark, a shelf of fungus near the flare, a branch that leafed out late and then didn't — and boring things are easy to drive past twice a day for years.
Here's our walk-around, in order, with a straight answer on each: call now, or watch it.
1. It leans, and the lean is new
An old lean the tree grew into is usually fine. Silver maples all over the Park Ave and Corn Hill lots lean toward the street because that's where the light was in 1955. What matters is whether the lean changed. Check the soil on the high side of the trunk: cracked, mounded, or turf torn like a carpet seam means the root plate is moving.
Verdict: call now. A moving root plate doesn't stop moving.
2. A vertical crack in the trunk
Frost cracks are a Rochester specialty — sun on the south face all afternoon, temperature off a cliff after dark, wood splits along the grain. Plenty callus over. Worry about the crack still open in July, with darkened edges, or lining up with a big limb above it.
Verdict: watch a hairline seam, call on anything you can slide a pencil into. Spring thaw is when these show themselves. Re-check in April.
3. Mushrooms or hard conks on the trunk or root flare
Fungus on a tree isn't like fungus on the lawn. It's fruiting because it's already eaten something. By the time conks show at the base, the decay column inside is years old — in the exact spot holding the tree up.
Verdict: call now if it's on the lower trunk or flare. A conk on a dead stub 30 feet up is a calmer conversation.
4. Deadwood in the upper crown
Look up with the sun behind you and count the grey, bark-free limbs against the green. A few dead twigs is normal shedding. Dead wood thicker than your wrist, over the spot where your car sits every night, is a scheduled event with no date on it.
Verdict: watch if it's small and over lawn. Call if it's over the driveway, roof or sidewalk. Lake-effect snow here is wet and heavy enough that dead limbs come down in storms nobody would call a storm.
5. Included bark in a tight V-crotch
The one homeowners never look for, and the one that costs the most. Where two big stems split off in a narrow V, bark gets pinched between them instead of wood knitting together. No structural connection in there — just bark on bark. Silver maple does this constantly. So does Callery pear. The tell is a dark, sunken seam running out of the union, sometimes with a wet stain below it.
Verdict: call now if either stem is over a target. Sometimes a cable and a reduction cut saves it — that's a real option, not a consolation prize. The 1991 ice storm, 17 straight hours of freezing rain, took out more silver maple than anything else here, and the trees that came through were the ones somebody had pruned properly beforehand.
6. Root heave, cut roots, or new pavement
Did somebody re-pour the driveway or trench for a gas line in the last five years? Roots severed on one side show up as thin crown growth on that same side, years later. Also look for a trunk that enters the ground like a telephone pole with no visible flare — often girdling roots, a Norway maple habit.
Verdict: watch, but get eyes on it. Hard to call from a photo.
7. Bare branches in June — especially on ash
If it's an ash, assume emerald ash borer. It's been in the city since 2011, when it turned up at Upper Falls Park off St. Paul Street, and Monroe County has some of the heaviest ash density in the state. Thinning from the top down, sprouts erupting from the trunk, blonde patches where woodpeckers stripped bark chasing larvae — that's the sequence.
Verdict: call now, and don't let it stand another season. Dead ash goes brittle fast. It doesn't hinge, it explodes, which is why we won't climb one that's been dead two years. And Monroe County sits in the EAB restricted zone, so that wood can't leave on your buddy's trailer.
About permits, before you get a surprise
This varies more than people expect. In the City of Rochester a permit is generally required for a private tree 6 inches or more in diameter, $90 fee — but owner-occupants of a one-family parcel under an acre are exempt, and so are dead, diseased, damaged or hazard trees. Neither exemption covers landmark trees or anything in the tree lawn; street trees belong to the City Forester Division. Brighton has its own rules under Chapter 175 plus the woodlot district. Brockport only regulates public and right-of-way trees. Confirm with your own town.
Walk your driveway tree this weekend with this list. Two or more of these on one tree isn't coincidence, it's a pattern — send us two photos, one wide and one of the trunk base, and we'll tell you straight whether it's a removal or a pruning job. Plenty are just a pruning job. We'd rather cable a good maple than grind its stump.