Ah, those moments of serenity....just before the havoc. Ice, it is so pretty when kept to less than 1/4 inch, but becomes so destructive when larger accumulations occur. In the Shenandoah Valley we seem to attract at least a little sleeze every year, and a serious bout of it about every 5 to 10 years(just as our trees are just recovering from the previous bout). So in my years here I have witnessed several major sleeze storms. So just how serious is that damage to your trees and shrubs and should you do something about it? Well, as is so often the case when we are dealing with trees and shrubs and the weather, that depends on.....
How many times have I repeated that statement over the phone over the years. To be sure answering most sick tree and shrub questions is not easy, and even less so when the patient can't be seen. Usually, I end up visiting the patient, and only then do I try to offer advice. And always, advice with a caveat- trees make liars out of foresters all the time. (If I say a tree will survive some calamity, invariably it will die and vice versa.) In short I can't really begin to give you specific advice, but I can provide some guidelines on dealing with your situation.
Tree injury from ice can range from minor breakage to the total destruction of a tree. Why do some escape scott free, while others are stripped to the ground? Sometimes it seems like just dumb luck, or lack thereof. But in truth there probably are some reasons for the level of injury a tree incurs. Several of the most important factors are pretty much genetic. A tree's natural ability to cope with ice is reflected in such characteristics as branching patterns and habits, wood strength and suppleness. Over millenia, tree species have developed adaptations that allow them to deal with the cimate in which they live. Take the white pine (pinus strobus), while having brittle wood it also has supple wood, wood that allows branches to bend and shed snow. But it doesn't handle ice well due to a large surface area created by the needles that allow for a great deal of weight to build up on the branches and putting the tree at risk. To compensate, the tree can readily respond to top breakage by having a side branch develope into a new growth leader. Like wise the tulip tree or yellow poplar (lirodendron tulipfera) is a very brittle, soft wooded tree but it can readily recover from the loss of all its branches by rapidly resprouting from dormant stem sprouts. This is probably a mechanism by which the tree avoids more serious stem breakage. The birches (betula spp.)on the other hand are very supple and will bow to the ground under a load of ice, only to spring back up through the course of the next growing season. At any rate it is fairly safe to say that most of our trees with a northern origin have some mechanism to deal with the added weight winter can bestow.
