Shedding Bark Horticulture Shedding Bark Shedding bark on some trees is a completely normal development. The bark of most young trees is smooth and thin. As the tree grows, the bark layer thickens with the outermost tissue eventually dying.
Continued growth pushes the bark outward, causing the outer layers to crack.
On some trees, the outer dead layers peel and drop off, revealing the inner layers of bark. Shedding or peeling bark is characteristic of trees such as the sycamore, redbud, silver maple, shagbark hickory, birch, and Scotch pine. The grayish brown bark on a large sycamore tree, for example, flakes off in irregular blotches revealing a cream or whitish gray inner bark. This summer the sycamores have lost larger than normal amounts of bark. The dry fall and record cold of last winter may have loosened more bark than normal leading to the heavy loss of bark.