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I’ve heard it said so many times it’s practically an industry reflex:
“There’s a mushroom. The tree needs to come down.”
It’s tidy. It’s decisive. It sounds responsible.
And, more often than we’d like to admit, it’s also a shortcut — one that reveals how uncomfortable we still are with the most ordinary truth in a forest:
Trees do not exist alone.
On an unseasonably sunny October morning in St. George, Ontario, I recorded this episode from Kyle McLoughlin’s property — two acres of the kind of quiet that makes you speak differently. Kyle is a Board Certified Master Arborist and the founder of Ironwood Arboricultural, but it’s his lens that grabbed me: he doesn’t just “do trees.” He sees the canopy through the fungal kingdom.
Kyle didn’t come to fungi from textbooks. He came through wilderness guiding, edible wilds, lichen, and the slow addiction of trying to understand an organism that looks like a plant but refuses to behave like one. By the time he apprenticed as an arborist, fungi wasn’t a side interest — it was the foundation.
And that foundation changes everything.
Diagnosis before decisions
Because once you understand fungi, you can’t unsee the ways our profession sometimes behaves like a doctor who refuses to learn about pathogens. Kyle uses an uncomfortably accurate comparison: arborists are physicians for individual trees. Urban foresters are closer to public health professionals, managing risk across a population. Either way, you wouldn’t accept a medical system where the diagnosis is, “There’s a symptom. Remove the organ.”
But we do.
We see a bracket fungus and jump to removal. We condemn trees without naming the species involved. We treat “mushroom” like a single diagnosis, when it’s a whole universe — thousands of species, different behaviors, different impacts, different timelines, different risks.
Kyle’s point isn’t that fungi are harmless.
It’s that fear isn’t a management plan.
Take Armillaria — honey fungus — a pathogen that moves through soil, kills cambium, and can outlive the people trying to fight it. In the episode, Kyle describes the helplessness that often comes with it: there’s no neat intervention once it’s established. No satisfying “here’s the fix.” Sometimes the best you can do is accept what the ecosystem has become and plan accordingly.
That’s not a failure of arboriculture. That’s reality.
Cities cultivate what they pave
And reality gets even messier when you zoom out to the city.
Most decay fungi don’t “appear” out of nowhere. Decay enters through wounding. And arborists aren’t usually the ones wounding roots — it’s road crews, sidewalk reconstructions, trenching, compaction, drainage redirection. We build cities that are endlessly hostile to trees, then act surprised when trees behave like organisms under chronic stress.
If you want fewer fungal problems, the first step isn’t a fungicide. It’s better growing conditions.
That’s why one of Kyle’s rapid-fire answers landed so hard: if city managers want to prepare their trees against fungal pathogens, they should start by building bridges with engineering departments. Not as a symbolic gesture — as an operational requirement.
We can’t grow big trees if every new capital works project “kicks the living bejesus” out of them.
And here’s the part that felt painfully familiar: tree people often lose ground at those tables because we lead with love. We sound like we’re defending beauty when we should be defending necessity. When we show up without numbers, without risk language, without the kind of clarity that engineers recognize as competence, we unintentionally help the misconception that this is “soft science.”
Kyle doesn’t romanticize that tension. He names the internal conflict: yes, it’s frustrating to talk about trees like a financial portfolio or stormwater infrastructure — but sometimes that’s the language that gets trees to survive another decade.
Biodiversity, he points out, is risk management.
Spread the risk. Avoid over-investing in one genus. Don’t wait for the invasive species or the pathogen to teach you the hard way.
And then — almost as a corrective — he admits what many of us hold privately: the economic framing still cheapens something deeper. The intrinsic value of a living world doesn’t fit neatly into an Excel sheet. But the Excel sheet is often what opens the door.
That’s the line we keep walking.
Tools that help us see (without confusing the point)
This is also where the conversation turns toward tools — not because gadgets will save us, but because better diagnostics changes behavior.
Kyle talks about pneumatic excavation (air spading) as a way to address below-ground stress — because you can’t prune your way out of soil compaction. He’s excited about sonic tomography because it can let us see what we’ve been guessing at. He lights up about the future of ground-penetrating radar — not only for litigation, but for prevention: homeowners and cities documenting roots before construction, so “this is fine” doesn’t become “this is dead.”
But even here, he’s clear: technology is a supplement, not the solution.
Nature first. Tech second.
Monitor what matters. Diagnose earlier. Intervene smarter.
Near the end, I ask Kyle what the Internet of Nature means to him, and he gives an answer that feels like the episode distilled into one sentence:
Use our tools for good — responsibly — in service of creating better growing environments for life.Not to replace the living world. To stop breaking it so efficiently.
After recording, I kept thinking about how much harm is packed into one casual sentence:
“There’s a mushroom. The tree needs to come down.”
It’s not just a technical error. It’s a worldview.
A worldview where we treat symptoms as verdicts. Where we remove what we don’t understand. Where the organism is forced to prove its worth to remain alive.
Kyle is arguing for something else: a slower, more credible, more disciplined arboriculture — one where diagnosis comes first, and preservation isn’t a slogan but a craft.
And if that sounds like an industry-level shift, it is.
But it also starts small.
It starts with learning the species.
It starts with asking, “Compression or tension?”
It starts with not mistaking a mushroom for a moral judgment.
Because sometimes the presence of fungi isn’t the bad news.
Sometimes it’s the system telling the truth about how we’ve built the world around it. And if you want to learn how to listen better, find Kyle and Ironwood Arboricultural on his website and Instagram.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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