One day several years ago,
when the youngest was 5 and her sister 8, the youngest brought home
from kindergarten a watercolor she had painted of a tree. Painted
on 9-by-18-inch paper, the tree’s shallow crown stretched the
18-inch width of the paper and off both edges. My wife and I of
course praised the painting and privately dubbed it the “mustache
tree,” but Amanda’s older-and-wiser sister knew better.
“That’s not how a tree should look,” she said. “Here. I’ll show
you.”
And produced in a matter of seconds the predictable
stick with its neat spherical crown perfectly balanced on top.
Elder sister had “learned” that trees should look like
green balloons.
I think of that little incident each
spring as I drive around marveling at the idiocy of people who have
hired tree “services” to have the trees in their yards “topped.”
Wherever you live in the West, you know what I’m talking about: the
reduction of perfectly good trees to ugly, albeit spherical,
stumps-with-bristles.
No one seems to know for sure how
this practice started. Some say power lines, but others more
plausibly point to an old European practice now largely abandoned
called pollarding, which was a similar but benign procedure whose
original purpose was to provide people — on a largely
deforested continent — with a reliable source of firewood.
Tree-topping, then, is pollarding made easy, pollarding dumbed
down, pollarding (why not say it?) American-style.
There
are dozens of Web sites on the Internet about tree-topping, and
they all say the same thing: Don’t do it. Besides the fact that it
doesn’t work (those blasted trees just grow back), topping starves
the tree, which reduces and weakens the roots, which doesn’t
increase the odds of the tree staying vertical. A topped tree is
forced into a survival mode. Most of the viable buds that would
have produced viable limbs have been removed, so the tree must now
rely on its latent buds, which produce weak, poorly anchored
watersprouts that look as if the tree’s hair is standing on end.
Meanwhile, what stored reserves are left in what is left
of the limbs are feeding this frenzied process (watersprouts can
grow 20 feet in a year) while at the same time trying to keep what
roots are left functioning. This means that all the tree’s energy
is being channeled into just staying alive “normally,” which means
little or nothing left to fight insects and disease, which spells
rot. Add sunscald to those parts of the tree not previously exposed
to sun, and it’s easy to see why arborists cry with one voice,
Don’t do it.
But people do. So why?
In my
search for an answer, I found an article in the July 1999 issue of
the Journal of Arboriculture that addresses the
question: “Underlying Beliefs and Attitudes About Topping Trees” by
James Fazio and Edwin Krumpe. Their study confirmed what you
probably already know, that people top their trees out of fear:
fear that the tree is somehow getting “too big,” and fear that this
great big wild thing will fall over and squash their happy homes.
Colossal ignorance, the authors found, is also a factor, and they
conclude their article with a call for more education.
But if, as they note, “a plethora of printed literature about
topping” is already available to the public; if, as I discovered, a
plethora of similar information is available on the Internet; and
if, as seems reasonable, common sense alone should be enough to
tell anyone that a tree should just be allowed to be a tree; then
— to repeat — why?
Fazio and Krumpe are
undoubtedly correct when they cite fear as the principal reason,
but I think the fear that drives people to top their trees runs
deeper than just concern for private property. Fear of the wild,
fear of nature, and the desire to control it, are apparently
elemental in the human psyche, and in America took the form of
conquering the wilderness.
There was nothing beautiful
about the great eastern forests, for example, to the colonists:
they were just a barrier to expansion and a threat comprised of
countless unknowns. The wild had to be tamed, and the effort to
tame continued for two centuries ever-westward. So it continues, of
course, to this day.
Michael O’Rourke is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer and transplanted
Coloradan now living in Tennessee.
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