Give And Take There’s More Than One Way To Prune A Tree, And Many Are Harmful

As soon as Cyndy Boyle saw the flier offering licensed, bonded, insured tree service, she thought of the unruly 40-year-old maple in her front yard.

Its branches scraped her son’s bedroom window and intruded into the back yard.

When Boyle and her family bought the house on south Jefferson last fall, they knew the maple would need attention this spring, as would their overgrown Russian olive and several conifers out back.

The contractor whose flier she answered walked the yard with Boyle and her husband, noted their concerns and offered a bid of $750 for pruning and the removal of several small trees.

“I assumed he knew what he was doing because he seemed so reasonable and attentive,” recalls Boyle. “But I should never, ever have left him while he was working in the front yard.”

Boyle was gone only an hour and 10 minutes while volunteering at school. Upon her return, “I just flipped!”

The once-rambunctious maple had been reduced - butchered, according to one local tree expert - to a stubby, unnatural hulk of trunk bleeding sap from dinner plate-size wounds.

In a word, the tree had been “topped,” what arborists call a variety of quick, aggressive pruning techniques that severely curtail a tree’s natural crown and cause numerous problems.

Unfortunately, Boyle’s experience is all too common.

Local Better Business Bureau president Lisa Stephens says each spring brings a new wave of phone callers complaining of ravaged trees (along with tales of unfinished work and exorbitant fees).

Jim Fazio, a professor in the University of Idaho’s College of Forestry and editor of the National Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree City USA Bulletin, observed numerous scenes of pruning carnage while driving through southeast Washington recently. “It was like someone had gone through with a chainsaw and destroyed hundreds of trees.”

Cass Turnbull of Seattle, professional gardener and founder of Plant Amnesty, a nonprofit group that promotes proper tree care, says most of what passes today for pruning isn’t. “It’s malpruning - it’s high-maintenance, it makes trees unhealthy, destroys their natural beauty, and, in the case of topping, can make them dangerous.”

On the bright side, Turnbull and Fazio acknowledge that interest in urban forestry seems to be growing, in part, says Fazio, thanks to the 1990 Farm Bill’s allocation of federal money to hire state urban forestry coordinators.

More than 2,200 jurisdictions, from large cities like Seattle to compact communities such as Fairchild Air Force Base, have qualified for Tree City USA status, a designation that reflects a strong commitment to urban forestry. (One qualification is an urban forestry budget of at least $2 per capita. Spokane, by comparison, spends 69 cents per resident.)

“But planting new trees while we’re topping the old ones is like buying furniture while the house is burning down,” says Turnbull. “We need to take better care of what we have.”

Figuring out what we have is part of Jim Flott’s job.

“Before 1995, we didn’t know much about Spokane’s urban forest,” admits Flott, horticultural supervisor for the Spokane Parks and Recreation Department. But with the aid of a $125,000 budget allocation last year, an inventory was begun of Spokane’s “street trees” - those growing in parks and public rights-of-way.

The survey won’t be finished until this fall, but already several facts are clear. “We have a very even-aged urban forest here,” says Flott, “with most of the trees dating back to the turn of the century. And we have very little species variety. Those two things are definitely a problem in an urban forest,” since monocultures tend to be more susceptible to disease, and our 90-year-old-plus trees all are reaching the end of their lives simultaneously.

“But the biggest problem we have in Spokane is topped trees,” says Flott. “Of the 20,000 trees we’ve collected information on, over 5,000 have been topped. It’s a serious concern.”

Topping starves a tree by interfering with its crown’s ability to manufacture food. Topping also exposes bark tissue to scalding sunlight, and opens wounds susceptible to insects and disease. It promotes rapid growth of weak, dense sprouts, making the tree dangerously imbalanced and ugly.

“Topping is the absolute worst thing you can do for the health of your tree,” according to a recent Tree City USA Bulletin.

And yet it persists.

“Some commercial pruners claim to be skilled and certified, but obviously don’t have a clue,” says Flott.

Plant Amnesty’s Turnbull points out that homeowners deserve a large share of the blame. “People have an instinctive desire to control nature,” she says. “That’s what makes us a great species. And we like cutting, so we do what comes natural, which, unfortunately, is not pruning.”

Scott Miller of Spokane’s Star Pruners says pruning isn’t difficult, “but it’s frightening to beginners. They worry are they removing too much? Not enough?”

Miller has taught pruning in classroom settings, but prefers the hands-on approach of going to students’ homes and guiding them through the process on their own trees.

Many pruning problems could be avoided, experts agree, by simply learning a little about trees before planting them. “If you match the tree to the site,” says Fazio, “you’ll reduce maintenance and avoid 90 percent of the problems” associated with urban trees.

Washington Water Power Co. system forester Sharon Vore is all too familiar with what happens when homeowners and developers pick the wrong trees. In Spokane County alone, WWP spends $2 million a year keeping errant branches from interfering with the safe delivery of electrical service.

“People are unaware that the small tree they plant today eventually will grow into the overhead wires,” says Vore. “Up at Nevada and Magnesium, where they’re building apartment houses, we’re working with the developers because the city required them to put a certain class of landscape tree right beneath where we have a three-phase feeder. We want to get that changed now, before it becomes a problem.

“It’s basically a matter of education,” says Vore. To that end, WWP offers a free, 24-page illustrated selection guide called “The Book of Trees.”

The recommended species, both evergreen and deciduous, were chosen because they are less than 30 feet tall when mature, grow slowly, and are appropriate to plant near overhead electrical lines.

Cities, too, often suggest appropriate street trees. At Finch Arboretum, for instance, the Spokane Parks and Recreation Department maintains a display of 34 trees well-suited for planting in urban settings.

Coeur d’Alene goes even further, requiring residents to choose from the city’s list of 59 approved species when replacing a tree in the public right-of-way.

“We’re trying not to be regulatory,” explains Spokane city landscape architect Debbie Clem-Olsen. “We prefer to educate people and encourage them to do the right thing.

“Some people aren’t eager to replace trees because they’re frustrated with the problems they had with previous trees. We try to demonstrate that there are good street trees out there that can benefit the homeowner and the community as a whole.”

“Right now,” says Flott, “Spokane’s urban forest is tremendously understocked. Our goal is to move from 59 percent (of available space in trees) to 82 percent. Some Midwest cities with long-running urban forestry programs are actually close to 100 percent.”

The problem, he says, is that “we live in an instant-gratification society, and trees don’t provide instant gratification.”

They require patience, proper care and conscientious pruning to survive our polluted, paved-over and otherwise unnatural urban environments.

But in return, Flott says, the urban forest helps clean our air, shade our houses, soften city noise and give our children a place to play, while also increasing property values and reminding us of our bond with nature.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ARBOR DAY ACTIVITIES “Improving the future” is the theme of Saturday’s Arbor Day celebration at Finch Arboretum, just south of Sunset Highway. Below are some of the free activities offered from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Call 625-6664 for info, Master composters will demonstrate how to build a compost bin, recycle yard waste. Learn to grow fresh fruits and vegetables in raised beds, when to water and which insects help improve crops. Children can make windsocks with the aid of Corbin Art Center volunteers. Learn about native plants through a seedling display from Tekoa’s Plants of the Wild. Also, 300 seedlings will be given away by the Spokane County Conservation District, and Native Plant Society members will offer information about club activities. Campfire boys and girls will share outdoor skills, and Sierra Club members will discuss their group’s activities and outings. Exotic cats from Mead’s Environmental Endangered Species Education Center will be displayed. Spokane Parks Department’s Jim Flott and Debbie Clem-Olsen will answer questions about urban forestry and the city’s ongoing tree inventory. Manito gardener Steve Smith will share spring-care tips with rose enthusiasts.