TSI Dilemma - help me identify candidate for girdling

[OneWithWood]

While doing some TSI recently I came across this walnut growing very closely to three stems of a tree I am unsure of the identity.
Here are two picks, one at ground level and one looking up.
What do you think?


 


 

If the trees are american elms I am tempted to let them be as the walnut will easily outlast them, on the other hand if I girdle them some delectable shrooms may appear in the next year or so at the base  :-\

If the trees are anything else they will soon be history.

[WDH]

My first impression is basswood.  If so, the twigs will zig zag, the buds will be very plump and roundish, and the buds are inequilateral in they do not sit right on top of the leaf scar, but rather about 45 degrees off the side, a distinctive feature for basswood. 

Is that lightning damage to the walnut?  Any indication that it is hollow?  Thump it with a stout stick  ;D.

[Clark]

I'd agree with WDH, they look a lot like basswood. 

I'm trying to rectify the first and second pictures, in the first there are three trees in the clump plus the walnut and in the second only two in the clump and the walnut.  Is one of them a leaner and it doesn't make it into the second picture?  Or is something else going on?

I'd be careful taking all of them out at once and leaving the walnut to fend for himself and I have two good reasons for suggesting that.  One is that the walnut has a bad fork in it.  The more trees you cut around it the more likely the top of the tree will catch a bad wind and split half the fork off the tree. I fully understand your desire to let the walnut grow to it's max by giving it full sunlight but it could come back to bite you.  The second reason is that the one basswood looks to be a nice straight tree with potential to put on lots of clear wood.  Leaving it will give you two crops trees right there and hopefully leave you with two instead of one or zero.  Just my thoughts...

Clark

[OneWithWood]

I agree with the basswood id. 

I do need to sound the walnut to see what the potential is.

Perhaps I should just girdle the two lesser basswood stems?

[WDH]

If you girdle two, that concentrates the growth potential in the root mass into one better quality stem.

[OneWithWood]

The walnut does sound a bit hollow.   :-\

I think I will girdle the two lesser basswoods.  Not sure what to do about the walnut - maybe fall it if I can clear the basswood limbs.

[OneWithWood]

Clark, I am not sure what became of that third stem in the second pic.

Maybe there is some magical quality about that third stem or maybe the gnomes are messing with me again  :D :D :

Thank-you for your sound advice.

[WDH]

Do you have many walnut? 

[OneWithWood]

Very few in the woods, maybe a dozen tops with the majority occuring on the same slope as the one pictured.  My property is not a good walnut site but they do grow here.  I planted about 400 in front of the barn.  The trees were attacked by a shoot beatle and it is only through intense pruning that some have grown relatively straight.