Tree topping: Why you shouldn’t top your trees
During the winter when we can see the limbs of our trees, we begin to start thinking about trimming our trees back. Maybe you’re worried about limbs or the entire tree falling on your house during an ice storm, blocking your mountain view, or just creating too much shade in the yard. There are right and wrong ways to go about correcting the problem. Often people want to “top” their trees. This is where tress are trimmed back to a few large diameter, older structural limbs.
While done with good intentions, there are several problems with this method:
1. Production of weak wood: The regrowth that occurs will be numerous fast growing branches that have weak unions with the main limb, later when these branches get heavier they will be prone to easily breaking off.
These limbs will easily break off
2. Nutrition: Trees need their leaves to manufacture carbohydrates for transport to the trees root system for growth and water transport. Generally you never want to remove more than 1/3 of the leafy part of the tree
3. Insect and disease issues: large wounds often to not completely heal, leaving the wound open for insect and disease invasion
4. Aesthetic value: A topped tree loses the shape and look that is unique to each tree species.
5. Fast new growth: Tree will grow quickly t try to get back to it's original height which causes tall spindly growth
What should you do if you have a tree that is too large for an area endangering a structure?
- Make thinning rather than heading cuts
- Sometimes it is impossible to effectively reduce the size of a tree and produce an aesthetically pleasing soundly structured tree. It is often just time to remove the tree and start over.
- Remember choose the right tree for the right location. Consider the eventual size of the tree and views you would like to keep.
- Prune trees from a young age to develop and maintain good structure.
Great job surely. As trees plays a vital role to our life existence, we should be more care about them. But lack of proper knowledge of caring, we may make a serious harm to our trees that bring a disasters impact surely. I just diver into your great details and impressed how you explained about not to topping. It's really knowledgeable. At the same time to keep the trees in proper growth and healthy sometimes we need tree trimming. Isn't it?
ReplyDeleteWhat a conducive job you did for the tree and landscaping fans! Just awesome help. The tree toping reasons you mentioned was really authentic and worth to follow. Thanks a lot for sharing online. But what about the installing a water feature? Can you please bring a focus on the issue in your future post?
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