Oh well; so glad this is September and not June!!!

==>> and perhaps that you werent out there weeding??? ...

and the fact it was fall ... was my first thought ...

ken

Glad you weren't there as Ken says. Sad about the deer, but the hosta will be back!

Lost a huge branch of a red oak last September--actually half of the tree. The red oak had two main branches and one split off (partially). I had to get the tree people out and remove the entire right branch and the area is now quite sunny. The tree was almost 50 feet high and the branch was huge. I feel your pain but at least we weren't out there when it happened!

thankfully no one's hurt and it didn't hit the house..the same thing happened to me..took weeks to clean up..just looking at your pic makes me tired..reminds me of something I read.."gardening is heartbreaking"..

> Beautiful calm day

What made it fall then?!

uhmmmm...gravity???? ... lol

ive had ice storm damaged trees.. snap back up a day or two later.. interior injury does not heal .. like perhaps a broken bone .... so no interior structure ....

then years later ... as the branch extends.. and thickens.. gains weight ... etc ... the branch just fails ... and you have barely any recollection of the long gone ice storm ....

ken

Gravity is acting on all trees and quite a lot of them are still standing :P

The interior injury thing makes sense though!

Also I assumed from the OP pics that it was a whole tree which had fallen and not just a branch...now on second look I guess it is a branch?

the only reason i recalled the injury.. was that some buck had scraped the heck out of it the fall previous ... boy that tree had a tough life.. early on ...

ken

We had this same oak to the drop HALF its canopy in one crash about 8 years ago. My kids still talk about it. Then we were out in the yard, feet from where it came down. Again very blessed. These oaks are 80+ yrs old. This one had BOB Burr Oak Blight. We inoculated last year and will again next. Many of them are all but hollow on the inside. This one wasn't. I say it fell due to physics at work. It was a windy weekend. It was a windy summer. Who knows when the crack happened..but eventually the weight of the branch brought it down. I am mourning the loss of the deer..but the rest of his family of four are fine and I am still hunting for a bird house or two. It may take until spring thaw to find it. There is just waaaay too much foliage in that area. For sure the hosta will return as if nothing happened and they were what maybe three weeks from a killing frost?