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My old ground guy said topping that silver maple would 'wake it up' and two summers later it's half dead
Back in 2022 I was doing removals for a guy in Roanoke and we had this silver maple, maybe 40 feet, and he kept pushing me to just top it because the customer wanted sun on their lawn. I said fine, we took about 8 feet off the top. Within 18 months it threw a mess of weak water sprouts, then the limb dieback started, and now the canopy is mostly bare on one side. Turns out the customer's neighbor is a certified arborist and chewed them out over it, so now I get asked why it looks like that. Anyone here got a line that actually lands with homeowners who just want more grass and don't care about tree structure?
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wyatt_mitchell263d ago
The part about "wake it up" is the real problem here, because the tree did wake up, just not the way he meant. Topping dumps all the stored food the maple had in that cut wood into a panic of new growth, so the tree spends everything it saved in one season instead of over ten. That flush of water sprouts is the tree burning its savings account, and when it runs dry the limbs start dying from the tips back. What a lot of guys miss is the roots. Those big surface roots under that lawn were feeding the same canopy you just cut, and now nothing is pulling sugar down to them, so they start to starve and rot in place. By the time the dieback shows up top, you're already two years behind on a root system that quit. So when the homeowner asks about the grass, the honest answer is that the shade was the cheap part. The tree was holding that slope, that soil, and that house's summer cooling bill, and now they're paying for all of it whether they see it or not.
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