Topping Trees is Bad
Don't turn your tree into a legal, aesthetic and financial liability; get the facts. Read and consider the following.
The misguided practice of tree topping (also referred to as stubbing, dehorning, pollarding, heading, tipping, hat-racking, and rounding over) has risen to crisis proportions in recent decades. Topping is a major threat to the urban forest, dramatically shortening the lifespan of trees and creating hazardous trees in high-traffic and residential areas.
What is Topping?
Topping is intermodal cutting of branches; it involves the indiscriminate removing or severe cutting back of tree branches to stubs or lateral branches not large enough to assume the terminal role. Often cuts are made at a uniform height, like flat-topping a hedge. In addition to being unattractive, topping is stressful to trees and makes them unhealthy. Topped trees are weak and may become hazards that will drop branches or topple over.
Good pruning means removing no more than one-quarter of the crown of a tree and no more than 20% for very young or very old trees. If more is removed, it interferes with a tree's ability to manufacture food, as well as limiting its defense against disease and insects. While there are many good reasons to prune trees, there are NO good reasons to top trees.
Topping creates a hazardous tree in four ways:
- It Rots: Topping opens the tree up to an invasion of rotting organisms. A tree can defend itself from rot when side branches are removed, but it has a hard time walling off the pervasive rot to which a topping cut subjects it. Rotted individual limbs or the entire tree-may fail as a result, often years later.
- It Starves: Very simply, a tree's leaves manufacture its food. Repeated removal of the tree's leaves, its food source, literally starves the tree. This makes it susceptible to secondary diseases such as root rot, a common cause of failing trees.
- Weak Limbs: New limbs made from the sucker or shoot regrowth are weakly attached and break easily in wind or snow storms, even many years later when they are large and heavy. A regrown limb never has the structural integrity of the original.
- Increased Wind Resistance: 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. Selectively thinned trees allow the wind to pass through the branches. It's called “taking the sail out” of a tree.
Other Considerations
- A tree's foliage protects the tree's branches and trunk from the sun. When so much of the crown is removed at once, scalding and damage to bark may occur. If neighboring trees and shrubs depend on shade, they also will suffer without it.
- The large branch stubs left by topping have difficulty healing. The size and terminal location of these cuts leaves them especially vulnerable to disease and insect invasion. If decay is already present, its spread will be accelerated.
- A topped tree is a disfigured tree. It will never regain the appearance that is characteristic of its species, and its aesthetic value will be forever changed. The sight of a topped tree is offensive to many people. The freshly sawed-off tree limbs are reminiscent of arm or leg amputations. And the freshly-sawed look is just the beginning of the eyesore; the worst is yet to come, as the tree regrows a witch's broom of ugly, straight suckers and sprouts.
Still not convinced? Here are even more reasons:
Trees are valuable assets to our home and commercial landscape, neighborhoods, and communities. Through education and voluntary action, topping can be eliminated, and we will all benefit.
