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Aunt Lindy’s guide to utility tree pruning

Roots, Shoots and Suckers
tree
A tree pruned for utility's sake.

Aargh, they’re baa-aack. The Utility Tree pruners (Whackers) are clearing the lines again.

You know, on Facebook they use a lot of abbreviations (because kids nowadays are way too busy to write) and there is a popular one written as WTF. According to Aunty Linda it simply means, “What the Fandango.” I’m a Facebook guy so there are occasions when I have used this expletive as well. I usually write it as WTFAL which simply translates to “What the Fandango Aunty Linda.”

Cyber language can spill out into your everyday language, and recently while driving in Battleford, I had a WTFAL moment when I saw that the Utility Tree Whackers had been by to remove offending branches that had the potential of tangling in the lines and causing either a fire hazard or transmission disruption during a storm. When I was working closer to the action, I think the tender specification for the Utility Tree Whackers was that anything within three metres of a transmission line gets whacked and it didn’t matter if the branch was angled away from the line either. There’s no room in tender specifications for subjective decision making.

A couple of things came to mind.

1) You would think that with all the training and certifications available, all the information on the internet and with all the things we know about trees now, that some of that easily available  knowledge would rub off on the Utility Tree Whackers. The cuts seen on these trees are the farthest thing from a pruning cut, encourage a flush of rapid response growth, and in the case of elm, are against the Dutch elm disease prevention regulations

2) You also might think that with all the information available to people (both homeowners and professionals), that they might check what the mature height of the tree they want to plant will be so that they do not plant a tree that matures as a large statured one in a location where it will inevitably conflict with overhead utility lines. Because WTFAL, the Utility Tree Whackers will have no choice but to eventually come and whack it into something other than a tree. Time after time.

3) I really don’t know anyone who likes to look at a severely Utility Tree-Whacked tree. In the case of the elms in the accompanying photo, they get whacked all the time because elm is a tree that genetically wants to be 60-100 ft tall. I wonder if the utility companies and the owners of the trees that are in the power lines could agree to remove the severely whacked and ugly trees that will be a perpetual problem and perhaps the utility company could provide a voucher to a local garden centre for the purchase of the right tree species for the right place. The utility company would be money ahead in short order.

Tree and utility conflicts, are an age old problem with some simple solutions.

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Do you know how trees access the internet? They just log on. Bahaha.

Consider logging into www.treesaregood.org and read about proper tree selection.

Why do dogwood trees make such good pets?

They have a great bark, but wooden ever bite.

Keith Anderson is the Executive Director of the International Society of Arboriculture-Prairie Chapter, Certified Arborist and Tree Risk Assessor