For the love of trees Experts offer advice on how best to care for your home trees
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bout a month ago, my HOA had some tree work done. I could hear the racket of their saws and woodchipper for hours as I worked in my home office. There are two tall trees on either side of our parking lot; I don’t know what kind, but they shake tremendously in the wind and it was not uncommon for large branches to fall off in a gust, so they clearly needed some attention. The next day, when I went to see the result of all that noise, I was dismayed to find these once-proud trees butchered beyond recognition. This wasn’t a mere pruning – this was practically an assassination. I know little about trees and tree care, but it seemed obvious even to me that the workers had no idea what they were doing, beyond trying to remove mass. The plants were
E L AY N A T RU C K E R denuded, with spindly branches suddenly bare to the sky and bizarre formations made out of the branches that hung down and to the sides. One of my neighbors declared that after seeing the hack job done on these trees she cried. It got me thinking: besides being unsightly, what damage could have been done to the trees with this poor pruning? I turned to two Napa locals who have been working on trees for a long time. Bill Pramuk, Consulting Arborist with Pramuk, Trees and Associates; and Joe Schneider of Pacific Tree Care, based in Calistoga. I knew their decades of experience could help me understand the consequences of bad pruning, as well as inform us of how we can best care for our trees in our fire-prone, drying
climate. Both experts agreed that pruning should be done sparingly, and Joe cautioned that this is especially the case in drought conditions. Pruning a tree is all about structural integrity: some trees add a fair amount of weight as they get older and, if they’re in your yard, tree owners will want to occasionally get rid of older branches so young growth has a better chance. Joe noted that our indigenous oak species can live up to seven hundred years Bill Pramuk (the oldest he’s ever come across was about four hundred), and they grow out and down, with old branches eventually sloughing off. That’s all well and good in a wild landscape, but on your property, you might need to guide this process. Propped limbs – branches that help prop up the tree – tend to be pruned away in favor of elevation, but this practice should be discouraged, as it can weaken a tree’s structural development. Bill says that “trees should be mindfully examined at least once per year, and not at the same
A Canary Island pine, Spain. Anders93, Dreamstime.com
48 | INSIDE NAPA VALLEY
SPRING/SUMMER 2021
