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Why this area is hard on trees
Three things shape what survives here. The soil is alkaline, which locks up iron and gives many species chlorosis, the yellowing between green veins you see all over town. Summers run long and hot with unreliable rain. And the wind is relentless. Mature trees here lean because of it, and storm limb failure is the single most common call in this trade.
The common trees
Live oak
Evergreen, broad, and the most valuable shade tree most properties have. Long horizontal limbs that get heavy and fail in wind if nobody reduces the weight. Susceptible to oak wilt, and live oaks share root systems, so the disease spreads tree to tree underground. Never prune February through June without painting every cut.
Post oak and blackjack oak
Natives, tough, and very fussy about their roots. Post oaks die years after building work, trenching, or a change in ground level over the root zone. The owner rarely links the two, because the gap is so long.
If you have a mature post oak, protect the soil under the canopy.
Pecan
The Texas state tree, and it is everywhere here. Big, long-lived, and weak in wind. Pecans drop limbs, and they drop them on cars.
Watch the point where two trunks meet in a tight V. If bark is growing inward there, that is where the tree splits.
They also crop in cycles. A heavy nut year is usually followed by a light one.
Cedar elm
The workhorse native. Handles the alkaline soil, the heat and the wind better than almost anything else, and turns gold in autumn. Small leaves, dense canopy, and generally low-drama. If you are replanting, this is the safe pick.
Hackberry
Volunteers everywhere, fast, and brittle. Prone to nipple gall on the leaves, which is cosmetic, and to wood rot, which is not. A mature hackberry near a structure is worth having looked at, because they fail more often than their size suggests.
Mesquite
Native, drought-proof, thorny, and almost impossible to kill. Deep taproot, so it survives droughts that take everything else. The problem is not usually the tree, it is that mesquite spreads into pasture and takes it over. On acreage it is a management job rather than a tree job.
Mulberry
Fast, shady and messy. The fruit stains driveways, cars and anything under it, and the surface roots lift walks. It comes up often enough in local removal work that Google lists mulberry removal as a topic customers mention on our own profile.
Bradford pear
Planted everywhere in the 1990s, regretted since. The branch structure is inherently weak, and they characteristically split down the middle in a storm at fifteen to twenty years old. If you have one that age near a house or a drive, it is worth planning for rather than waiting for.
Crape myrtle
Not really a shade tree, but everywhere. Handles the heat and the soil well. The main problem is what people do to it every February, cutting the whole canopy back to knuckles. It survives that. It does not need it.
What to plant instead
Replacing a tree? Five do well in this soil and this wind: cedar elm, chinquapin oak, bur oak, Texas red oak and lacebark elm.
Water deeply, and not often, for the first two summers. Mulch out as far as the branches reach. Keep the mulch off the trunk itself.
Warning signs on any species
- Mushrooms or shelf fungus at the base, which usually means the root plate or the lower trunk is already rotten
- A crack or seam running vertically down the trunk
- Bark falling away in sheets with nothing growing back
- A tight V-shaped fork with bark growing inward, which is where the tree splits
- New lean, or soil lifting on one side of the base
- A limb that leafs out late, thin, or not at all in spring
Any one of those on a tree within falling distance of a house is worth a look before storm season, not after.