by UnwashedMolasses » Sun Oct 30, 2016 9:51 am
Best tree I've seen is hard to say because they're fascinating in so many different ways. The big ones are always awe-inspiring. We installed lightning protection and support cables on a two-stemmed tulip poplar where each stem was 40". With those, when you look up and see a guy in the top of the tree it kinda feels like when you're in a plane and you see cars on the ground.
Some of the more interesting trees are the ones that shouldn't be alive. Trees can sometimes take a surprising amount of abuse, so I've seen individuals whose stem goes up a couple feet and hits a sharp right angle because thirty years ago another bigger tree fell on it.
I was at a client's house recently got to work with my favorite tree, Devil's Walking Stick. I love it because the stem looks like someone took some old bones and made them into medieval instruments of torture but it's got the largest leaves of any tree species and when the leaf bud is just opening at the start of the spring, that mean-looking stem produces some of the most gorgeous purples and greens on the new leaf growth.