Might they be water oaks? I understand those are prone to breakage.

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/st553

could we get a distant view of the tree ...

undercanopies are often bare.. as the tree expands and shades out the interior ...

where did you collect them.. where in your travels .... in other words.. are these trees ok for your area .. obviously they have lived a long life.. so that cant be that far out of range.. but we need to discuss ...

we need to find some leaves on the ground.. so we can start with an ID ...

what if any hurricane or other weather problems have you had in the last 5 to 10 years... aka.. tree time ...

i dont think fert is worthwhile.. but unless you dump a truck full under it.. its not going to harm anything.. presuming we are arent talking about tree spikes .. which.. imo.. are worthless ...

ken

Thanks for the feedback and sorry for doing some "worthless" fertilizer, yeah, was spikes. With the sandy soil here in west central Florida and the afternoon monsoons, anything applied on the surfaces gets washed away quick. The trees came from less than 30 miles away from what i remember, pretty much the same environment as here and from reading about water oaks, that sounds like what these may be.

Here's some additional photos I just took today. There are 3 of them basically doing the same thing although we have some others that are much stronger and have basically a single trunk. This is the one beside the house.

These are the other two further back towards the lake:

This is a closeup on some leaves:

This is how the branches shoot off all over the plave:

And this gives you an idea of how the trunk does not appear to be one homogenous tree:

They constantly drop dead branches and there's a lot of dead branches still in the tree. Read that we're not supposed to prune/trim oaks in fall as they don't have time to heal before winter but our winters are usually short and if it gets below freezing it's just overnight.

All help appreciated.

Thanks,

Scott

They look like Laurel Oaks or maybe a hybrid with Water Oaks. Both are short lived species. Even though they can get much larger I often see specimens of this size already start declining from "old age". Often these trees develop rotten cavities in the trunks and branch bases and are prone to splitting and breaking. 30-50 years is the usual life span for these trees.

They used to be fuller and green but have definitely been declining. Wondering if the best think would be to trim them out as much as we can and hope for the best or just bite the bullet and remove them. One of them seems stronger than the others but two of them are dropping branches like crazy.

Best to remove them now before they become problems. Replace them with stronger, longer lived oak like a Sand Live Oak or Southern Live Oak.

Hate to do that as we're not intending on staying here forever and anything we plant will just be saplings and we'll never see them grow to adult-hood. Those are the only shade in the whole back yard. We have a type of cassia tree (?) in our front yard that grows super fast, is beautiful and great shade. Might see about trying to get a few of those to replace them.

The shedding may be self-maintenance.

> "trim them out as much as we can" That was going to be my suggestion. Start with branches that clearly are unproductive. Then If more need to be culled, try to recognize those whose health is in permanent decline; with emphasis on uppermost parts of tree, the benefit being more light to lower parts.

Some branches you will remove, others you will reduce in length.

Act in the knowledge that (apart from the clearly unproductive) you are abruptly subtracting from a tree's energy supply; so, the overall amount matters.

How long are you planning to stay? Live oaks are much stronger. But be aware that many trees that grow very fast have weaker wood.

Thanks, we know all about that. Had some eucalyptus trees that were like Jack's beanstalk, got to 75'-100' in no time but dropped branches 8" in diameter and 15ft long, you could feel them hit the ground. Two got struck by lightning so we took them all out, hated it, they were great shade. We're probably here for the next 5-10 years and hoping to retire out of the area, totally overpopulated here now and happy to have +1 acre on a lake.

We're going to start trimming them out and totally understand the workings of the plant, biology/botany major who ended up a mechanical engineer, go figure. Will try to do the least harm. Is it okay to trim them out now? We really don't get much of a winter here. And have read good and bad about pruning sealer, what is the consensus on that?