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Some folks see trees as objects or ornaments, inanimate and non-moving. Serving no broader purpose, as if trees have nothing to do and no purpose.
I happen to think that way of looking at trees is boring and reductive. There must be utility for those who see nature in this way. Perhaps it makes it easier to exercise dominion over nature if it is ‘in your way’. Or if you arbitrarily want things to look a certain way.
Concerning ourselves with a ‘right way to take care of trees’ does not consider the broader philosophies that inform how people approach the care of trees, or nature as a whole. To think some way is ‘right’ and another way is ‘wrong’ is oversimplified.
Consider if the outcomes of the work align with the reasons for doing the work in the first place. Perhaps we can ascribe ‘wrongness’ to outcomes that don’t align with the intended outcomes, and ‘rightness’ to ones that do.
Expectations and Assumptions:
Apple trees in an orchard are not pruned to be pretty. They're treated in such a way that optimizes fruit production, minimizes fruit loss, and reduces the likelihood that the trees break under the weight of a heavy yield. Specific intended outcomes. Specific reasons for doing things to them.
Big shade-casting trees that coexist with people lack a need for the level specificity an orchard-tree might have. They sort of just need to remain mostly green and not self-destruct.
People who hire tree companies to work on their trees cannot always articulate what it is they want. They’ve been conditioned to believe they must have their trees pruned every year without really knowing why or if that is universally true in the first place.
There isn't a single “right” way to work with trees. But within certain contexts, there is a certain set of reasonable assumptions to make, even if the client cannot articulate them.
A reasonable assumption that you, the arborist, can make when thinking about a client’s trees is that you shall not increase the risks the tree poses or decrease its longevity. And can you achieve the intended results while incurring the least amount of damage to the tree.
Think about lion-tailing: By moving any large stem’s center of mass further outwards, you are increasing the likelihood that it breaks.
This is an example of when pruning is ‘wrong’, even if the client requested it. The ethical professional does not do these things; they do not allow clients to put themselves or their trees at greater risk. That is not why you are being hired, and taking money for that is weak.
What makes this wrong is that it does not align with the commonly assumed desired outcome. The intended outcome of pruning trees in urban spaces, unless you’re veteranizing or something, is not to increase the chances that a tree breaks.
Another very common example of misalignment is the pruning to make trees healthier by removing all of their epicormic growth. There are many examples of this concept, but this practice is ubiquitous and easy to identify and describe. Pruning, by and large, is done to address risk and not health (in like 99% of cases), and in the specific case of removing epicormic growth; is factually incorrect.
Context Matters
Veteranizing is the deliberate creation of habitat features in a tree. To ‘veteranize’ a tree is to elevate it into a different life stage. Veteran trees can occur naturally too, and they’re typically identified by having lots of habitat features that form naturally, like hollows, tears, dead stems, etc..
In the context of veteranization, certain things might be appropriate to do to a tree that you would not do to a tree in an urban setting with targets around. And yet, arborists and tree cutters regularly do things that go against the reasonable assumption of not increasing risk.
Check it out.
The big removal cut. Classic. Client requests a limb be arbitrarily removed, tree company agrees, charges way too much, tree is left in a worse off state than before, client is happy for a few years until this:
This is usually where we enter the equation. We’ve seen this time and time again; we now have to run a stability analysis on trees like this thanks to excessively large removal cuts. Is the tree biologically functional? Yes. Does the tree now have an increased habitat value? Yes.
Is the tree (or this stem) as stable as it was pre-wound? Certainly begs the question, and that’s why we run stability analyses on these kinds of features. Tree stability can improve naturally over time with or without us, but the main takeaway here is that these large removal cuts can sometimes result in premature condemnation of a tree, even if the tree is biologically functional and healthy.
Most tree companies use these features to justify killing them. And to be fair, sometimes that is the the right course of action. But oftentimes reduction is necessary to improve a tree’s stability once a large wound like this festers long enough.
If the client were informed at the time that a wound of this size isn’t likely to close, and it also might result in a failure point in the future, in our experience, they almost always are open to alternatives.
But something tells me the client was not informed of that possible outcome when that cut was originally made. Lying-by-omission or lying-by-ignorance qualifies as ‘wrong’ too. The client probably did not want to create a habitat that can cause some stability loss right next to their house.
Ignoring the location of the tree in the photo for a moment; if the intended outcome was to improve the habitat value here, then this might qualify as ‘right’. Then this did achieve that. It has introduced a feature that wouldn’t be there otherwise.
More examples:
If you’re not familiar with the practice of hedgelaying, you might be freaked out to see a pleacher cut:
You might call a pleacher ‘wrong’ if you didn’t know the intended outcome. This stem will survive this, and will send epicormic shoots upwards from the laid stem.
If you’re not familiar with veteranization, you might think girdling this stem is ‘wrong’ too.
Or that using spikes on a tree you’re veteranizing can be just fine. It aligns with the intended outcomes.
These are all examples of types of tree cutting that are fine to do in one context, but without a good understanding of biology, ecology, or ethics (lol), and the context where you might apply these things, you might just be doing things ‘wrong’.
You might be leading clients and their trees towards disfavorable outcomes. And they didn’t hire you to make things worse for them.
Different Perspectives:
Some perspectives align more with biology or ecology. Other perspectives have been shaped by legacy tree work and landscaping. Encouraging clients’ preoccupation with shaping things to how we think they should look. Keeping their property pretty and clean and safe from insects. Making every tree "optimum" just gives you stuff to sell but it doesn't necessarily make for a healthier ecosystem.
Some philosophies have more substance and aura than others. Alex Shigo himself said it in his book 100 Tree Myths:
Many tree treatments were developed to profit the tree worker, not the tree.
A profound statement from one of the most thoughtful tree-thinkers of our time made before the tree care industry was in the pocket of equipment manufacturers and fertilizer companies.
Some perspectives just suck lol. To see trees as liabilities, to call certain species ‘junk’, to only know how to kill trees and sell reasons to kill them. Priorities and information from industry sources dominate the perspectives on tree care for obvious reasons. Leading towards production-based practices becoming the gospel for most tree-cutters and arborists; having learned their trade on outdated ideas.
Ecocentrism:
The more people learn about trees, there is a tendency to land on an ecocentric perspective. At least those who aren't solely motivated by capitalism alone.
Your trees being wildlife repositories isn't a choice. You don't manage your trees for either aesthetics or habitat. It is always habitat, there isn't a choice. Unless you deliberately make it not. Things will use your trees. Or they'll try to, at least. It is sort of like a pond. Is the pond always in use by birds? No, but it is important that it is there when they need it. Beneath the ice of a pond, a lot more is happening than you can imagine. The same is true for arboreal habitat.
It might be interesting to argue that arborists ought to think more about how to keep dead and dysfunctional trees or tree elements in urban landscapes. How to actually manage those is interesting and useful, ecologically speaking.
Working with trees through the lens that trees aren’t just for you to make money with, but that they’re important beacons of habitat that are worth defending and thinking about makes our communities better. It improves biodiversity, not lessens it. It keeps all of the necessary elements of healthy forests around instead of removing them in the name of ‘pretty and insect-free’. It’s what it actually means to be an arborist: To take care of trees.
Clients often don’t know what to care about when it comes to their trees. They rely on so-called experts to guide them towards good decision making. And the evidence of this being not the case is abundant. Take a walk in your neighborhood, look at the trees.
The ecocentrism approach is not niche, it is a need. It is easy to get clients to buy-in, especially when they realize how much less expensive is to care in this fashion than the conventional approach.
Science Grows:
There’s a sentiment in arboriculture that our understanding of trees is finite and fixed, and that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of working with trees. That whatever is the ISA Certified Arborist study guide is written in stone.
But the truth isn’t so rigid. Philosophies of how to achieve best tree outcomes is varies amongst practitioners. There is common agreement on certain macro-principles for managing urban trees, but there is variation on a micro-level. There are reasons to deviate from best management practices at times, but it takes the true arborist to know when those moments are. It takes the true professional to know when to stand up for a tree.
An assessment of the ethos of the company you’re with really matters. Are you with a company that only sees trees as a means of making money? That doesn’t really care about the long-term outcomes of the work?
Can your crew leader answer the questions of “what are we doing to this tree and why”? Or better yet, can you answer that yourself?
If the work you’re doing does not align with explicit desired outcomes or the baseline assumption, you might have some things to reassess.