healthy trees provide shade for low income mobile home owners - Ask Extension
In the mobile home park where I live, a new landlord bought the place a few years ago and chopped down over half of our mature trees reducing the amou...
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healthy trees provide shade for low income mobile home owners #891532
Asked January 13, 2025, 2:21 PM EST
In the mobile home park where I live, a new landlord bought the place a few years ago and chopped down over half of our mature trees reducing the amount of shade in the park and causing some homes to become much hotter inside than they were before. Since then there has been a statute passed by the state of Colorado saying that mobile home park owners shall not cut down healthy trees. Our landlord just sent a letter saying he intends to cut down the rest of the trees claiming they are old and dangerous. The previous owners maintained the trees by hiring a tree service to come every year to trim trees and inspect them. When the tree service felt a tree was dangerous due to age/health, they would cut down that one tree. The current owner just plain doesn't want to spend money maintaining the trees so he wants to get rid of them instead. Is there a way to have our trees inspected and declared healthy (or not whatever the case may be) so that we can prevent the loss of the little bit of shade we have in the summer?
Boulder County Colorado
Expert Response
So sorry to here your story. Trees are so important on so many levels.
The Boulder County Master Gardner Program has a “tree team” that can be scheduled to “diagnose” issues with trees. At this time (winter season), they are only examining conifers. The tree team needs to be scheduled with the Boulder County extension office ( https://boulder.extension.colostate.edu/ ), and there is a charge of ~$35/tree. They usually look for signs/symptoms of disease/injury and render an opinion. I don’t think existing policy allows them to render a “healthy tree” verdict given there are just too many variables ( past winter watering habits, existing soil nutrition, festering root rot, invisible bug infestations, dormant mold spores, etc. ).
For a deciduous tree to be deemed healthy, one usually must wait for the warmer temperatures of Spring and the leaf-out to complete. The tree leaf communicates a lot of information used in diagnosis.
You might consider hiring a professional arborist to render an opinion.
Hope this helps.
The Boulder County Master Gardner Program has a “tree team” that can be scheduled to “diagnose” issues with trees. At this time (winter season), they are only examining conifers. The tree team needs to be scheduled with the Boulder County extension office ( https://boulder.extension.colostate.edu/ ), and there is a charge of ~$35/tree. They usually look for signs/symptoms of disease/injury and render an opinion. I don’t think existing policy allows them to render a “healthy tree” verdict given there are just too many variables ( past winter watering habits, existing soil nutrition, festering root rot, invisible bug infestations, dormant mold spores, etc. ).
For a deciduous tree to be deemed healthy, one usually must wait for the warmer temperatures of Spring and the leaf-out to complete. The tree leaf communicates a lot of information used in diagnosis.
You might consider hiring a professional arborist to render an opinion.
Hope this helps.
