What Are Cabling and Bracing? What’s the Difference Between the Two?
Tree cabling and bracing are the two main types of tree supports that can be used to support a tree for its optimal health. Tree cabling involves using flexible steel cables and/or wires as supports between tree branches or between branches and the tree trunk. Tree bracing refers to the use of fixed, rigid poles for the same purposes. These techniques are often used together.
Why Would a Tree Need Cabling or Bracing?
People most often think of the need for cabling or bracing for older trees or trees that have sustained some form of damage. And although cabling and bracing can be used to support damaged trees, these techniques are only typically used temporarily in these cases, as long-term structural support of damaged trees isn’t usually helpful in preserving the life of the tree. Bracing and cabling can be used temporarily on damaged trees, however, as a stopgap to wait for better conditions or circumstances to either remove damaged limbs or to remove the tree entirely.
More often, cabling and bracing are used as preventative techniques that give peace of mind to homeowners. Large trees with heavy limbs, or any limbs of significant size that overhang a portion of a home, or a walking path, or any other place where it could be dangerous for a large limb to suddenly fall, are excellent candidates for cabling and bracing. These cables and braces are put in place to provide extra support between limbs or between limbs and the tree’s trunk, to try to prevent a sudden catastrophe if the tree undergoes major stress (such as strong winds or heavy snowfall).
Trees with multiple major trunks can be especially vulnerable to splitting, so the trunks might be cabled or braced together. Branches with relatively narrow or oddly angled unions with the trunk can also be candidates for limb loss, so these limbs might be cabled or braced to the trunk or to another major branch (although awkward limbs such as these are also candidates for complete removal). Large, older trees with erosion around the trunk or storm damage that is not so bad as to require the removal of the tree, can benefit from cabling or bracing while the trees recover and while the soil around them is repaired.
How Do Cabling and Bracing Work?
Tree cabling and bracing both work to support the weight and stress of one part of a tree with the strength of another. Both can help to extend the life of a tree, reduce risk to people or property, and maintain the balance and beauty of a tree over time.
Tree cabling and bracing techniques should only be utilized by experienced tree service professionals. It’s the type of work that if it needs to be done, it needs the expertise of a professional — if the cabling and bracing aren’t so important that it’s ok to do it as a DIY task … then it probably doesn’t need to be done at all. Attempting cabling or bracing without the required knowledge and techniques can do more harm than good and can put people and property at greater risk of harm.
Cabling and bracing can be effective tools in the management and maintenance of your trees, and can help your trees to live to their healthy, full, long-lived potential, safely. We would be happy to advise you on tree cabling or bracing, and would be happy to help you to take the best possible care of your trees from now into their leafy futures.
