Please take a look at this pictures and tell me what you think would cause this "twinning" of the branch pattern. The main stem splits at chest heighth, and from that point on, each branch on one stem is almost always mirrored by a branch on the other stem. Notice the two additional splits, also, at the same heights. If you need more photos to better illustrate this strange pattern, I can get them
Scott
I think the Ginkgo likes to do that. There is an enormous old one in town here that looks exactly like yours, but larger. I have had small ones on there way to that look--they throw up a lateral branch that immediately turns up and becomes another leader.
Yes, it's the nature of Ginkgo. The mirror-image pattern is pretty interesting, almost like it split into identical twins!
If you can catch it soon enough (much too late for this tree), removing the second leader will make it a much stronger tree. But I saw a couple of them near temples in China that were many centuries old with multiple leaders, still hanging in there. Of course, there was no snow loading to worry about there.
Guy S.
Just about to ask about that. Did not someone describe the thin angle between leader and branch as being doubly weak because the rate of growth did not allow stronger wood to form? In all species do we prune away this thin angle and to what circumference do we prune and no further? I have mature sugars and yellow birch that could be "shaped" by removeing a thin angle limb of 5-10 inches circ within my working height. Much of the "forest" is what I call clump trees: mostly sugars, but a lot of basswood "clumps" of truely large circ and mature height. Is it good management to start taking the smaller of these stems for the benefit of the understory? Ken
It's not all that simple. Some trees, like basswoods, naturally grow as clumps. The maple clumps are not normal and probably originated as stump sprouts following fire or other disturbance. Other trees, like American elm, naturally develop narrow forks but have an interlocking wood grain that makes them resistant to splitting.
For small-diameter forks in young trees, thin them to the best single leader if that's the way they normally grow. With mature trees in critical settings, it's better to have them cabled than to make very large pruning wounds. Sometimes it's also possible, with medium-sized competing leaders, to head one back to a lateral and slow it down, making it become a lateral branch smaller than the "real" leader.
Guy S.
