Tree Topping
Trees can add a lot to your landscape; shade, beauty, a sense of permanence and maturity, or simply, a place to hang your hammock.
Trees have evolved for millions of years and can do pretty well without our help, but if they’re growing close to where people live, work or play, then they require a little maintenance to keep them safe and healthy. Usually routine maintenance can prevent or remedy many problems that trees might have, while neglecting it causes heartache later on.
As important and helpful as good maintenance is, poor practices and bad work are often worse than doing nothing at all. Soil disturbance, bad pruning cuts, climbing with spurs, or over-pruning all cause more problems than they might solve.
One of the worst offenses is the practice of “topping.” Topping is cutting the ends of all limbs in the crown of a tree to stubs. The most common reason for topping is that the tree is getting “too big”. It’s an understandable fear that as a tree gets larger it gets taller and heavier and has more potential to do damage.
Proper maintenance and monitoring can almost always prevent a tree from becoming a hazard. If the worry over the size of a tree persists, sometimes it’s better to remove it and replace it with a smaller growing tree than to top it. Besides being unsightly and defacing the natural beauty of a tree, topping can cause severe health issues and a long series of detrimental consequences.
Topping removes most, if not all of a tree’s leaves, taking away its source of food production. The tree will have to use stored energy to produce a new set of leaves, leaving it weaker and with a lack of reserve energy. Like people, trees are more susceptible to secondary afflictions when weakened.
Another consequence of topping is decay at the point where large cuts are made. Trees respond to injury by trying to grow new tissue to encase the wound. Large stub cuts in trees are difficult for them to repair and as a result there is often decay that spreads down into the limbs from the cuts. The tree forces out multiple sprouts to create foliage as quickly as possible; those sprouts are often dense, tangled, poorly attached, and weak from growing too quickly. The sprouts expand into each other and become weaker over time, and the wood in sprouts is not as strong as normal wood. What you’re left with years down the road is an ugly, dangerous tree with terrible structure and decay. Why put yourself and your tree through the pain? Take good care of them instead; it will pay dividends for years to come.
Michael Davie became an International Society of Arboriculture Certified Arborist in 1993. He can be reached for consultations at Snow Creek Landscaping.
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