 Re: Why Topping?
Every time we make a cut into living tissue we cause an injury to the tree...therefore all pruning (of live timber) is "bad" for the tree, the greater the volume of live tissue removed the worse the impact on the health of the tree.
No I'm not saying there aren't defendable reasons for pruning a tree, just that it is important that we recognise the impact of the cuts we make..irrespective of the intention.
Pollarding has its roots in European social history and the management of timber resources, it became a method of "managing" larger trees in restricted urban areas, based on a 24mth cycle of cutting it was to some an efficient and economical means to deal with regrowth. Is it in some way better than lopping??? Well if the tree being pollarded has been cut since a juvenile and has very well developed pollard heads then sure it is a more sustainable pruning regime than lopping and topping....unfortunately there are very very few examples of such long term pollarding, rather more common in all urban areas are trees that have been lopped and topped in a failed attempt to mimic the pollarding approach.
Is it better to have crap pollarding (really topping) or replace the trees...which given the budget problems all LGA's have would mean less trees, well each community should be involved in such decision making, for me personally I'd rather have fewer but bigger trees in the urban forest and have porper long term management built on worlds best practice, rather than what we have at the moment.....
__________________ Sean  Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
- Kahlil Gibran
|