Urgent
Hanging or broken limbs
A broken branch caught in the canopy, a limb hanging by a strip of bark, or a split at the point where a large limb joins the trunk.
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Kansas tree problems
Something is wrong with my tree
Almost nobody arrives here knowing the name of a disease. They arrive knowing that the leaves went yellow in July, that bark is on the ground, that something is dripping on the car, or that the tree is leaning further than it was last month. This section starts where you actually are — with the symptom — and works toward the cause, the urgency, and what to do about it in Kansas conditions.
Start with what you seeThree things that should not wait
If one of these describes your tree, keep people and vehicles out from under it now. If anything is touching a power line, call your utility — not a tree service.
Interactive guide
Start from what you can actually see
You do not need the name of a disease to make progress. Pick the part of the tree that looks wrong, add what you suspect if you have a hunch, and the list below narrows to the guides that fit — each one with its own causes, urgency, and next step.
20 guides — most serious first
- Urgent
Cracks and splits in the trunk
A vertical split in the trunk, a crack running down out of a fork, or a seam that has opened along the stem — sometimes with sound or movement in the wind.
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- Urgent
A leaning tree
A tree tilting to one side, with soil cracked, mounded, or lifted on the side opposite the lean, or roots pulling out of the ground.
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- Address soon
Chewed leaves, bags, or webs
Leaves reduced to holes, notches, or lace; small cone-shaped bags hanging from evergreen twigs; or silk webbing wrapped around branch tips.
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- Address soon
Evergreen turning brown
Needles or scale foliage going tan, gray-green, purple-brown, or rust colored — on one side, from the bottom up, from the inside out, or all at once.
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- Address soon
Thin, see-through canopy
More sky visible through the crown than there used to be, smaller leaves, or a tree that leafs out later and finishes thinner than others of its kind nearby.
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- Address soon
Dieback at the top
Bare or sparse branches at the very top of the crown while the lower canopy still looks reasonably full — the stag-headed silhouette.
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- Address soon
Bark falling off
Bark lifting in strips, plates, or sheets — sometimes revealing smooth pale wood, sometimes sawdust and insect tunnels underneath.
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- Address soon
Holes in the trunk
Round, oval, or D-shaped holes in the bark, neat rows of shallow pits, sawdust collecting in bark crevices or at the base, or open cavities where limbs used to be.
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- Address soon
A hollow or cavity in the trunk
An open cavity in the trunk or a major limb, soft crumbling wood you can push a tool into, or a trunk that sounds hollow when you knock on it.
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- Address soon
Mushrooms or conks at the base
Mushrooms, shelf-like brackets, or dense clusters growing from the lower trunk, the root flare, surface roots, or the soil nearby.
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- Address soon
Is this tree dead?
A tree that never leafed out, leafed out on only part of the crown, or has held bare branches through a full growing season.
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- Monitor
Yellow leaves
Foliage fading from green to yellow well before autumn — sometimes with the veins still standing out dark green, sometimes across the whole crown at once.
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- Monitor
Brown, crisp leaf edges
Leaf edges and tips turning tan or brown and going papery, often with a narrow yellow band between the dead margin and the green center.
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- Monitor
Spots on the leaves
Dark spots, blotches, or raised tarry patches scattered across the leaves — sometimes discrete circles, sometimes irregular areas that follow the veins.
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- Monitor
Curling or distorted leaves
Leaves cupping, twisting, puckering, or growing narrow and strap-like — usually the newest growth, sometimes only on one side of the tree.
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- Monitor
Sticky leaves and black film
A shiny, tacky film on leaves, and on everything parked or set under the tree — sometimes followed by a black sooty coating on the same surfaces.
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- Monitor
Small branches on the ground
Twigs and small branches accumulating on the lawn, drive, or roof — sometimes with green leaves still attached, sometimes gray and brittle.
Read the guide
- Monitor
Sap or dark ooze on the trunk
Wet, dark streaks running down the bark, sticky or foamy ooze from a crack or old wound, or clear sap dripping steadily from a cut.
Read the guide
- Monitor
Roots above the ground
Roots radiating across the lawn like ridges, often scraped pale on top by the mower, or soil eroding away from the base of the tree.
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How this section is organized
Eight ways a Kansas tree goes wrong
Four of these describe where a symptom appears. Four describe what is behind it. Most real problems belong to one of each — chewed foliage is a leaf problem with an insect cause, a lifted root plate is a root problem with a storm cause — which is why the guide above asks both questions.
Leaf problems
Where you see it · 7 guides
Leaves are the cheapest tissue a tree owns, so they are the first thing it sacrifices and the earliest honest signal you get. Color tells you about the roots and the soil; edges tell you about water and wind; spots and holes usually tell you about weather that happened weeks ago. Most leaf symptoms are survivable. The reason to read them anyway is that they arrive a full season or two before the trunk and branches admit to anything.
Bark and trunk damage
Where you see it · 5 guides
Everything above ground is carried by one column, and the living tissue doing the carrying is a thin sleeve just under the bark. That makes trunk symptoms categorically different from leaf symptoms: a tree can shrug off losing its foliage twice in a summer, but it cannot rebuild a trunk. These are the problems most likely to end in failure rather than slow decline, and the ones where guessing from photographs is least reliable.
Branch problems
Where you see it · 5 guides
Where a tree is dying tells you nearly as much as how much of it is dying. Decline that starts at the very top usually means the roots or the water-conducting tissue are in trouble. Thinning that spreads from the inside out is a different story. Limbs that release in still air are a third one, and the only one of the three that can hurt someone this week.
Root problems
Where you see it · 3 guides
Roots are responsible for more tree failures and more slow declines in Kansas than every insect on the list, and they give up almost none of their evidence where you would think to look. Most root damage is invisible for two to five years, then arrives all at once in the canopy. The handful of things you can actually see at ground level — surface roots, a lifted root plate, fungal conks on the flare — are worth taking seriously precisely because they are rare.
Insects and pests
What is behind it · 8 guides
Kansas has a short list of insects that genuinely kill established trees and a long list that merely look like they will. Emerald ash borer, bagworms on evergreens, and the pinewood nematode belong to the first list, and all three are decided by timing. Aphids, galls, webworms, and leaf beetles belong to the second, where the honest advice is usually to do nothing and let the natural enemies catch up.
Fungal diseases
What is behind it · 7 guides
Where a fungus is working matters more than which fungus it is. Foliar fungi disfigure leaves in wet springs and cost the tree very little. Canker fungi kill patches of the living layer under the bark and can girdle a limb. Wilt fungi plug the plumbing and can kill a mature tree in one season. Decay fungi consume the structural wood in the trunk and roots — the only group that turns a health problem into a safety problem.
Storm damage
What is behind it · 5 guides
Kansas breaks trees on a schedule: straight-line wind and hail from April through June, derecho-force gusts in summer, ice in the back half of winter. What most homeowners underestimate is the delay. A limb that cracked in a June storm often lets go in August, and a root plate loosened in saturated soil can hold for weeks before a routine wind finishes the job. Fresh damage is obvious. Lingering damage is what falls on things.
Environmental stress
What is behind it · 9 guides
Add up drought, heat, high-pH clay, compacted subsoil, trenching, grade changes, and trees planted three inches too deep, and you have the cause of more Kansas tree decline than every pest and pathogen combined. None of it is dramatic and none of it shows on the day it happens. It is also the category where a homeowner has the most real leverage, because the fixes are water, mulch, and restraint rather than a product.
What the urgency labels mean
Every guide carries one of three labels. They describe how much time you have to respond, not how sick the tree is — a tree can be in serious long-term decline and still be perfectly safe to stand under, and a healthy tree with one cracked union can be the most dangerous thing in the yard.
Urgent
Treat the ground beneath the tree as off limits and get eyes on it now. These are the conditions that end in something falling.
3 of 20 guides are labeled urgent
Address soon
Not an emergency this afternoon, but the window for a useful response is measured in weeks. Left alone, most of these get more expensive rather than less.
9 of 20 guides are labeled address soon
Monitor
Watch it, correct the care behind it, and check again next season. Nothing here threatens people or property in its current state.
8 of 20 guides are labeled monitor
Read this part
What a website cannot do
These guides are written to make you a better observer of your own tree. They cannot examine it, and no amount of detail changes that. An arborist standing at the base of a tree has access to information that does not exist in a photograph, a description, or a search result.
The defects that matter most are inside the tree
Root and butt decay, hollow columns, and unions that are bark-to-bark rather than wood-to-wood decide whether a tree fails. None of them photograph. They are found by sounding the trunk with a mallet, probing, excavating the root collar, and sometimes with decay-detection instruments — all of which require standing next to the tree.
Risk is a relationship, not a property of the tree
A hollow cottonwood in open pasture and the identical tree over a bedroom are not the same situation. A real assessment weighs how likely the part is to fail, how likely it is to hit something, and what happens if it does. Two of those three questions are about your property, not the tree.
Different causes produce the same symptom
A dozen unrelated problems turn leaves yellow, and several of them call for opposite responses — more water and less water look identical from the sidewalk. What separates them is sequence, site history, and what the roots, collar, and branch cross-sections show. That is on-site work.
Some responses have deadlines and consequences
Ash treatment windows close as a canopy thins. Oaks should not be pruned from April through July in Kansas. A pine killed by pine wilt has to be removed and destroyed before the beetles emerge in spring. Getting the timing wrong is often worse than doing nothing, and pesticide decisions carry legal and environmental weight.
What this section is genuinely good for: narrowing a dozen possibilities to two or three, telling you which observations are worth making and which are a waste of a Saturday, keeping you from doing something that makes the problem permanent, and helping you tell the difference between a tree that needs attention this year and one that needs it before the next storm. Used that way, a homeowner who has read the right guide has a far more productive conversation with an arborist than one who has not.
Need someone to look at it in the Wichita area?
For hazardous conditions, storm response, and professional inspections around Wichita and the surrounding communities, we refer readers to Kohnen's Tree Service — a working Kansas crew whose field experience informs the guides on this site.
When a situation calls for professional help in the Wichita area, we refer readers to Kohnen's Tree Service, a working Kansas tree-care company whose field experience informs this site. That relationship is disclosed here and on our About page.
Once you have narrowed it down
A symptom points at a cause, and the cause usually has a page of its own.
Kansas Tree Guide is an independent educational resource. Nothing on this site replaces an on-site assessment by a qualified arborist or tree-care professional. Guides are written from extension research, state agency guidance, and the field experience of working Kansas tree professionals, and are reviewed as conditions change. Last reviewed August 2026.