DON'T TOP TREES

---

Don't turn your valuable landscape's assets into aesthetic and economic liabilities.  

The misguided practice of tree topping has risen to crisis proportions nationally over the last decade. Topping has become the urban forest's major threat, dramatically shortening the lifespan of trees and creating hazardous trees. The importance of trees to the urban and global ecology is only now becoming fully known and appreciated. This dawning has not yet been accompanied by adequate public education and sound public policy to ensure tree survival and our own safety. 

According to Dr. Alex Shigo, world renowned scientist and author on the subject of arboriculture, topping is the most serious injury you can inflict upon your trees.  Severe and repeated topping can set up internal columns of rotted wood, its effect only manifesting years later or in conjunction with   other stresses such as drought.  Ironically, many people top their trees because they think it offers a safer tree. On the contrary, topping creates hazard trees. In many cities, topping is banned because of the public safety factor and the potential for lawsuits. Topping creates a hazardous tree in four ways:                                

          • ROT- Topping opens the tree up to an invasion of rotting pathogens.  A tree can defend itself when side branches are removed and the branch collar left intact, but it can not wall off pervasive rot caused by topping cuts with the branch collar removed or damaged.  Rotted limbs begin failing resulting in eventual tree failure years later.                                       

          • STARVATION- Very simply, a tree's leaves manufacture its food.  Repeated removal of the tree's leaves literally starves the tree. This makes it susceptible to secondary diseases such as root rot, canker, and boring insects, all common causes that kills trees.                                          

          • WEAK LIMBS- New limbs made from the sucker or shoot regrowth are weakly attached and break easily in wind or snow.  A regrown limb never has the structural integrity of the original, and will break sometimes many years later after they become large and heavy with catastrophic results.                                          

          • WIND SAIL- The thick regrowth of suckers or sprouts resulting from topping make the tree top-heavy and more likely to catch the wind. This increases the chance of blow-down in a storm. Judiciously thinned trees allow the wind to pass through the branches and cancel out shear. It's called "taking the sail out" of a tree.

A topped tree must be pruned annually or every few years, and it eventually must be removed when it dies or the owner gives up.  Each time a branch or spar is improperly cut, numerous long, skinny young shoots called suckers or watersprouts grow rapidly back to replace it. These must be repeatedly cut because they always regrow the next year making the job exponentially more difficult.  Much like the many-headed Hydra, people create maintenance monsters in their back yards.  A properly pruned tree stays "pruned" longer, since the work does not stimulate an upsurge of regrowth.  Proper pruning actually improves the health and beauty of a tree, costing you less in the long run.  Topping also reduces the appraised value of your tree.  A tree, like any landscape feature, adds to the value of your property.  Using the International Society of Arboriculture's guidelines for evaluation, appraisers subtract hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars from the value of a tree after it's been topped.  One can even sue a tree company for wrongfully topping a tree.

The sight of a topped tree is, at the least, unsightly, and that eyesore is just the beginning.  The witch's broom of ugly, poorly attached sprouts ruins the crown.  The natural beauty of a tree's crown is a function of the uninterrupted taper from the trunk to ever finer and more delicate branches; a natural fractal.  The regrowth of suckers or shoots will bloom poorly, if at all.  Some arborists consider topping trees akin to a criminal act, because a tree's lifetime achievement of natural beauty can be destroyed in an afternoon.  Some trees may reestablish themselves after many years but remain hazardous.  Finally, topping destroys the winter silhouette of a tree.   Most topped trees are considered a total loss.