Deadwood removal

Every mature tree carries some dead wood — it is a normal part of how a canopy renews itself. It only becomes a problem when there is something valuable underneath: a driveway, a trampoline, a car, a footpath, a person.

Why Canberra eucalypts shed limbs

Eucalypts are famous for dropping branches, and Canberra’s climate makes it worse. A dry summer stresses the tree and it sheds load. A wet spring puts weight into a limb that has been quietly decaying at the union. Either way, the limb comes down — often on a still, hot day with no warning at all.

Deadwooding does not stop a tree being a tree. What it does is remove the material that is already dead and already destined to fall, so the failure happens on a rope with a groundie watching, not at three in the afternoon over your driveway.

How to spot deadwood from the ground

• Bare limbs in a full canopy. A branch with no leaves in spring while the rest of the tree is in leaf is dead, not late.
• Bark falling away. Large patches of bark shedding off a limb means the tissue underneath has stopped working.
• Grey, brittle wood. Deadwood loses its flex. It snaps rather than bends.
• Fungal brackets. Shelf fungi growing out of a limb or a union indicate internal decay — the visible bracket is the fruiting body of something already well established inside.
• Hangers. A broken limb caught in the canopy is the most urgent version of this. It will come down. Call us.

What deadwooding involves

We climb the tree properly — ropes and harness. From up there the arborist can see and reach the whole canopy, test suspect limbs by hand, and cut back to sound wood at the right point so the tree can seal the cut. Larger dead limbs over anything valuable get roped and lowered rather than dropped.

Being in the canopy is also the only way to inspect it properly. Most of what we find worth telling you about — a split union, decay at a fork, a crack you cannot see from the lawn — is found on a deadwooding job.

The good news on approvals

Deadwood removal is one of the few pruning activities the ACT explicitly permits on a regulated tree without an approval, provided the work is genuinely limited to dead material. That makes it one of the simplest and most worthwhile jobs you can do on a protected tree. More on what needs approval.

How often?

For a mature eucalypt over a house or a driveway, every two to three years is a sensible cycle. For a tree over open lawn, longer is fine. If the tree has been through a drought or a big storm, bring it forward.