The climber who told me to stop topping every tall maple

Back in 2018 a guy from Buffalo watched me take a 60 foot red oak down to a stub and said 'you're making a hazard, not a shade tree', so I started doing crown reductions with proper cuts and now I see way fewer splits, anyone else get that same wakeup call from a stranger?

1 comments

1 Comment

verawhite9d ago

Might be worth asking if that guy from Buffalo was a certified arborist or just someone with strong opinions. Plenty of folks yell advice from the ground that sounds smart but doesn't hold up in every tree. A good crown reduction does change the load on the branches, sure, but maples are stubborn. They'll still throw water sprouts and re-split if the tree was already stressed or planted wrong. Seeing fewer splits is nice, but it could also be luck or the tree just getting older and denser. Hard to prove one stranger's tip was the real fix without a control tree and a few decades of data. Either way, if your cuts look cleaner and you're not climbing as much, that's a win. Just don't give the Buffalo guy all the credit.