This was done by pros who assured me this tree has weak branch structure and this is necessary, but god, now I hate looking at it. Just need some expert opinions. It looks unbalanced and stripped to me, but I am also open to the idea that I may be overreacting. Help a tree hugger out, magical arborists!
by AccordingAnxiety6248
7 Comments
Can you show a before? I can understand why they didn’t completely take out those 2 co-dominate leads, but I also see they didn’t really try to subordinate them. This tree has/will have some structural problems for sure. Those unions already look like they have included bark starting, they aren’t wrong about that. These hybrids are problematic for a lot of reasons, but this one.. yikes. Also, it’s buried. Expose that root flare please. Maple are already prone to girdling.
There’s no fixing that.
Too much off the bottom without correcting the codominant leads. It’ll look fine in the long run, but still need those codominants corrected.
Lul. In undergrad, we had rows of these to practice on because they are so jacked up – if we could prune them decently it was a win.
IOW: it doesn’t matter. It will be gone in 20 years so who cares. Practice on your own.
They didn’t do any end weight reductions on the co-dominant branches. This is not proper structure pruning of an autumn blaze maple. They didn’t take “too much.” They literally encouraged continued poor structure with this pruning. Still fixable.
Just wait until next year and find someone who will prune the apical growth of the co-dominant branching back to lateral branches and encourage a central lead/clump. You really can’t over prune these trees if you do it correctly and often. Good luck!
This is so badly lions tailed I wanna cry. The trees not doomed and it’ll look a lot better in 5 years. If you’re interested in correcting the co dominant leads as suggested, hire someone to make heading cuts, not to remove the leads entirely. I’d also wait 2-3 years to correct the co dominant leads to give your tree time to recover from its current prune. The lions tail will always look a little weird but the tree will look a lot better in 5 years
It’s a maple don’t worry too much about it… your house is tiny imagine this tree in 20 years… you are within the range where you can start thinking about shaping the top each year to keep it manageable… it will eventually break free but good candidate for this.