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Watched a topped silver maple grow back into 14 weak leaders over 6 years, and the homeowner still thinks it looks great
Did a removal estimate last Tuesday on a silver maple in a yard off Cherry St, homeowner told me how much she loved the tree because it came back so full after the utility crew hacked it back in 2018. I walked the canopy and counted 14 leaders sprouting from that flat cut, all of them shooting nearly straight up, all of them attached to decayed wood. Six years, that's all it took for those sprouts to reach 18 to 20 feet, and every one of them is a future failure point hanging over her kid's swing set. I showed her the rot column in the cut with my probe and she said the tree looks healthier than it ever has. Told her the fullness is the tree panicking, throwing everything it has into vertical growth because it lost its stored energy and root balance in one afternoon. I quoted removal at $1,850 and she's shopping it because a guy down the street told her she can just have the sprouts thinned every few years. Six years of watching this play out and I still haven't found a way to explain it that lands. Any of you got a line that actually gets through to people on this?
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taylor_hayes2520d ago
The line about the tree being "healthier than it ever has" is the one that kills me every time, because folks see green and full and that reads as healthy to them. What finally started working for me is to stop talking about the tree and ask if I can cut one of those sprouts to show them the wood. Most of the time the pith is already brown and punky on an 18 foot sprout off a cut that old, and once they see the dark ring with their own eyes, you don't have to argue anymore. I also stopped saying "weak leaders" and started saying "these are attached to dead wood, not to the tree" which is a whole different picture in their head. And the thinning plan the other guy pitched, that's the part I'd point at hard, because cutting those sprouts just makes the tree push more of them and you end up doing it forever for the same money. Tell her a topped maple never gets back to the tree it was, it just stays a sprout factory until something fails, and the swing set is what decides how long she gets to wait.
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