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.
It seems this story is based on an unpublished paper abstract presented at European Congress on Obesity 2026 titled “Higher Dietary Polyphenol Intake Is Associated with a Lower Risk of Short Telomeres: Evidence from the SUN Cohort Study”.
You can see it in the conference program.
https://eco2026.org/assets/docs/programme-book.pdf
And here is another reference.
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-european-congress-on-obesity-unpublished-conference-abstract-on-association-between-higher-dietary-polyphenol-intake-and-lower-risk-of-short-telomeres/