Pretty old apple tree in the garden which produces hundreds of not-great-tasting apples every year looks like it’s in a bit of a state. I had to cut back a weird branch that had been cut before, presumably because it shot out horizontally, and there’s a ton of rot.
It’s not in danger of hitting any buildings if it ever does fall, although could maybe take out a distracted child or two if I’m lucky.
Is there anything I can do to save it?
I knew an old apple tree something like that. The rotten cut limb was a few feet higher though. The thing looked bad, with a gaping hole, but somehow it just kept going. Mostly it didn't produce hardly any apples, but every 4 or 5 years or so for some reason it would be loaded with big decent enough cooking apples. It was always covered in ants. It was a great tree for climbing too, despite the ants.andnl caterpillars. Hard to imagine anything killing that tree, even if it was mostly useless and a bit on the ugly side, and looked like it might die every year. Eventually the property was sold to some rich people. They blasted away the outcropping of granite close by, and razed the old house, cleared a bunch more of the land to make room for a monstrous "cottage" just where that big old apple tree always had been. So it goes.
Anyhow don't listen to me. Take the advice of the arborist and plant some new trees, and let that one go when the time is right if it doesn't leave you first. But also don't underestimate a tree's ability sometimes to deal with crazy circumstances and keep going perhaps longer than they should have.
You’re not wrong. I’ve lived in this house a good while now. It was previously owned by the family of a kid I went to school with. The family had long since moved and had been renting out the house for years before I bought it.
I showed the guy a photo of the garden shortly after I’d bought it about 15 years ago, because I’d cleared it after the previous tenants had let it get wildly overgrown. Even then, his first response was “I can’t believe that apple tree is still standing”.