New Bern Tree Care:
8 Tips Every Homeowner Should Know

Check whether the tree is actually yours

That big oak between the sidewalk and the street may not belong to you. In New Bern, trees in street and sidewalk rights-of-way, parks, cemeteries and other city-owned open space are public trees, and the Parks and Recreation Department looks after them. If one is leaning, dropping limbs or lifting the sidewalk, the city wants to hear about it, and it has a tree evaluation request form for exactly that.

Nobody, including us, should be cutting a city tree on a homeowner's say-so. Call Parks and Recreation at (252) 639-2920 first. If it turns out the tree is on your side of the line, then it is yours to deal with.

Find out if you need a permit before you get quotes

Some private trees in New Bern need a removal permit. That covers the two local historic districts (New Bern and Riverside), the National Register districts (Degraffenreid, Ghent Neighborhood 1 and 2, and Lawson Creek) and commercial sites with landscape buffers. In the local historic districts you also need a Certificate of Appropriateness, so that is two documents, not one.

Development Services handles private property permits. Outside those areas, most homeowners can remove a tree on their own lot without one, but it costs nothing to ask. We go through the districts in more detail on our New Bern tree service page.

Leave trees in power lines to the utility

If a limb is touching or growing into a power line, do not prune it yourself and do not hire anyone to do it until the utility has been called. Current can travel through wet wood and through a pole saw, and a line does not have to spark to be live.

Most New Bern homes are on the city's own electric system, and the city keeps crews clearing its line rights-of-way year round. Report a tree in the lines to the number on your electric bill. Once the line is safe, we can deal with the rest of the tree.

Prune in late winter, before hurricane season

Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. The time to take weight off long limbs and thin out a heavy crown is late winter and early spring, while the leaves are off, the structure is easy to see, and there is time to schedule the work properly.

Dead wood can come out any time of year, and anything genuinely hazardous should not wait for a season. But if you are hoping to get on a tree company's schedule the week a storm shows up in the forecast, so is everyone else in Craven County. More on timing in our tree trimming guide.

Do not top your trees, or your crape myrtles

Drive around New Bern in February and you will see crape myrtles cut back to bare knuckles. NC Cooperative Extension calls it "crape murder," and it does the opposite of what people want. The new shoots that grow from those stubs are weakly attached, they snap in wind, and the tree often blooms later and for less time.

The same goes for shade trees. Topping a tree to make it "safer" for storm season produces a crown full of weak, fast-growing sprouts that are more likely to fail, not less. If a tree needs to be smaller, the right answer is a reduction cut back to a healthy side branch. If it is simply the wrong tree for the spot, that is a conversation about removal and replanting.

Watch your pines after storms and dry spells

Loblolly pines are everywhere in New Bern yards, and they are the trees most likely to be quietly dying while still looking green from the street. Pines stressed by drought, flooding, lightning or wind damage attract bark beetles, especially Ips engraver beetles and, in bad years, the southern pine beetle.

Signs to look for: needles turning yellow then bright reddish brown from the top down, small holes or sawdust in bark crevices, little blobs of resin on the trunk, and bark that starts to peel. By the time a pine turns fully brown, the beetles have usually moved on to the next one. A dead pine near a house should come down sooner rather than later, because dead pine wood gets brittle fast and is much harder to climb safely.

Watch the ground, not just the tree

Much of New Bern sits low between the Neuse and the Trent, and wet ground is the thing that brings healthy looking trees down. During Hurricane Florence in 2018, city officials warned that saturated soil would topple large trees, and it did. Wind gets the blame, but a root plate sitting in soggy soil has lost most of its grip.

Walk around your big trees a few times a year and look for:

• A new lean, or a lean that has gotten worse
• Soil cracking or heaving up on one side of the trunk
• Mushrooms or conks growing at the base or on the roots
• Cracks, cavities, or bark falling away from the trunk
• Dead limbs high in the crown, sometimes called widowmakers
• Roots that were cut for a driveway, patio, sewer line or fence

Any one of those is worth having someone look at before the next storm, not after. Water oaks and sweetgums in particular can look fine on the outside and be hollow inside.

Mulch like a donut, not a volcano

A ring of mulch two to three inches deep, spread out toward the drip line, is one of the best things you can do for a yard tree. Mulch piled a foot high against the trunk is one of the worst. It holds moisture against the bark, invites rot and insects, and can encourage roots to circle the trunk and eventually strangle it.

Keep the mulch pulled back a few inches from the trunk so the flare at the base shows. And keep cars, trailers and piles of fill dirt off the root zone. Compacted soil starves roots of air, and the damage often does not show up in the canopy for a few years.