You want to be careful here Wendy. After every major windstorm we get guys in unmarked trucks knocking on doors in Clayton and Wake Forest offering quick tree removal. Do not hire anyone who knocks on your door without you calling them first.

Make sure whoever you hire is a certified arborist and demands a written scope of work before they touch a branch. If they say they can just drop it without a permit or a written contract, send them packing. A bad limb job can unbalance a pine and make it even more dangerous in the next storm.

When we had the bad storms back in the nineties, several of the old pines along Boundary Street in Mordecai came down. People were in a panic and cleared out every mature tree on their lots, which completely changed the character of the neighborhood.

The newer developments over toward the highway seem to strip every bit of shade, leaving nothing but baking asphalt. I would think long and hard before taking down a healthy tree. A good pruning is often all that is needed to let the wind blow right through the upper branches.

Pruning is fine, but do not ignore what is happening at the bottom of those pines. When you get heavy rain pooling around the base because of poor grading, the red clay turns to slick grease. That is when healthy trees pancake right over.

If you have standing water within ten feet of those trunks, you need to fix the slope of your yard first. I had to regrade the entire northwest corner of my lot in Apex because water from my neighbor's driveway was saturating my pine roots. Once I diverted that runoff, the ground firmed up beautifully.

Wendy, those loblolly pines have a very deep taproot when they grow in undisturbed soil, but in our Piedmont clay, they often spread their lateral roots wide instead. The NC Cooperative Extension office has a wonderful guide on storm damage prevention.

Limbing them up, or crown thinning, is definitely the standard practice to reduce wind resistance. Just make sure they do not remove more than twenty-five percent of the living crown. You should aim to get this done in late fall or winter when the trees are dormant, which also prevents bark beetles from being attracted to the fresh cuts.

Thank you all so much for the sound advice. Jolene, that tip about the bark beetles and waiting until late autumn is exactly the kind of seasonal safety detail I was hoping to find.

Diego, I will definitely avoid the door knockers, we already had one truck drive slow past the driveway yesterday. I am going to contact a certified arborist today to get a written evaluation and schedule the work for November.