Dear Editor:
On June 9 and 10, one of the six remaining Bradford pear trees lining the sidewalk between the basketball courts and the gazebo in Church Square Park was cut down and the other five were hacked by men with chain saws, carelessly chopping off the major artery branches and leaving skinny young limbs with few remaining leaves. This assault on the exterior shape and foliage of the trees made no attempt to properly prune by thinning the interior of the trees; branches were left overlapping each other at acute angles and will remain prone to future cracking and breaking.
These trees should have been pruned in the first three years of their growth to eliminate weak crotches and to encourage the stronger branches to develop sound frameworks not susceptible to damage from storms. Pruning also shapes the tree so that it will age with a balanced form to avoid future splitting of branches and other consequences of instability.
But these men with chain saws displayed no knowledge of pruning. Major branches were eliminated from one side of the tree while clusters of branches on the other side that could have been thinned were left intact. As a result, three of the trees are horribly off-balance undermining their future survival. A balanced tree is not only beautiful, but more likely to withstand strong winds without limbs breaking off or the entire tree falling down.
Pruning is an art that requires adequate understanding and meticulous execution. Every branch or limb should be carefully considered before being cut and should never be cut without having an absolutely good reason to do so. Decades of tree growth can be lost within minutes if an irresponsible action is taken without thorough analysis of the situation.
Many branches removed were not cut flush with the trunk but left as stubs. These should never be left untreated. By coating them with a wound dressing such as tar, the drying out, cracking or rotting of the trunk and weakening of branches can be avoided.
Even if the pruning had been properly done, its timing made no sense. Trees need their leaves during the summer months. Pruning should be done during the dormant period after the leaves fall in autumn and before they bud in spring so the new leaves can grow into the newly pruned structure. Instead, most of the leaves were eliminated just prior to the summer, after the trees had invested considerable stored energy to grow them to fulfill their photosynthetic function of capturing sunlight to energize growth. The trees may no longer have sufficient resources to regenerate the leaves, so that they will be baked by the summer sun and may not survive. Likewise, the humans beneath them will now have no shade to shield them from the summer sun.
These trees robbed of their branches and leaves are ugly, unbalanced, vulnerable to rot, leave that park area without shade, and may not survive. It saddens me that trees that took decades to grow could be so quickly and thoughtlessly destroyed and that our city government sanctioned it and our taxes paid for it.
Mary Ondrejka