Unnecessary tree removals

[Peter_Jenkins]

I’ve been speaking to neighborhood association meetings lately educating folks on tree care and one of my subjects is about lies people will use to convince or scare home owners into taking down good trees.

One guy I heard about in a neighborhood would look for a black carpenter ant to crawl up a tree trunk before he loudly hammered on the home owner’s door to yell, “Lady, you have ants in your tree. They are in the roots and the tree can fall at any time!” He had a high success ratio in getting trees removed.

What other stories are tree guys using to get people to remove good trees?

 

[Tom Dunlap]

The trees are:

Too tall
Getting into the sewer line
Killing the grass
Breaking the foundation

Chock it all up to tree phobia scare tactics.

Tom

 

[KERNSLOTH]

Here's a cringer... Here in Botha the homeowners like to have superficial four foot deep "ponds" dug in the yard with the biggest, most majestic tree on the lot smack dab right in the middle of it on a little island. The general requirements are: A) the pond may be no deeper than four feet, because we don't want the kids to drown. B) The pond must not be spring fed, because you can run a garden hose to it to fill it up. Especially good if you live in horse country, because you wouldn't want to breed any west nile mosquitos during the next drought. C) The new pond must be within 15 minutes of a natural body of water, to assure the convenience of having mother nature at one's beckon call.
D) Dig all the way into the dripline about a foot from the root flare, and fill that new pond up.
All you need is a friend with an excavator or trackhoe and you're in business! A surefire removal next year with minimal T&M invested. You might be lucky and the tree will already be on the ground when you get there. Just watch out for that lil mud hole!

 

[Peter_Jenkins]

How about the tree that leans? Every tree that leans is going to fall, right? Of course it is going to fall right on the house, even if it is 180 degrees away from the plane of lean.

Pine trees of course have to be taken out. The pine bark beetle might get ‘em if you don’t . Or pines might fall at any time. Where did that come from? Oh yes, they fall because they move more than the stiffer hardwoods in a breeze. Folks don’t know that pines are like antennas and are limber. If they didn’t move, we would have no pines at all, and they are older than hardwoods as far as evolution is concerned.