Any idea what happened to those trees?

The trees along my commute have been cut in what seems to be a barbarian butchery. They are underneath a high tension powerline so I understand the need for pruning. But I've never seen it done like that. I'm not ever sure how that's even possible on such a large scale.

Have you ever seen anything like it? It's the same for hundreds of trees, and I have a hard time believing any of them can recover from that.

Could that be a valid and deliberate technique to stunt growth?

Or shpuld I start asking questions to the city about the botched job of their subcontractor?

I’ve never seen any tree work with that result.. outside of Mother Nature in the form of wind and/or ice. Please investigate, and keep us updated!

yup, this is a standard procedure in our area. it’s done with a tractor with basically a bush-hog on an arm. super ugly. i’m guessing the reasoning is that they’ll have to come back and cut them again anyway, so leaving them mangled and liable to get sick is fine. my suspicion is that any complaints will fall on deaf ears.  i’ve even seen the grinders reaching out to mangle limbs from trees that weren’t anywhere near the lines or roads.

That looks like what they did around my road I live on. They used a big brush hog that was on an arm coming off a pretty big tractor. I was happy they did it as visibility around curves was getting really bad and could barely pass vehicles.

However they took small tress to the ground essentially. Left quite a few butchered limbs though off the bigger trees. I keep mine nice and trimmed myself so none of mine got the hack job.

Where I live the electric company hires a company that drives down the road cutting the trees.  I can't remember what the machine attached to the truck looks like.

What it looks to me in that picture is maybe due to the water the truck got stuck causing the machine to rip the trees instead of cutting them.

It is anyone guess and we may never know what happened.

The brush hog on an arm that everyone is describing is also called a bank mower, and it is very likely this is what was used. Very common.

It is a flail mower on an articulating arm, they can nibble small caliper trees and branches, as well as mow steep road embankments, behind guardrails.
One machine, one operator, everything is "mulched" and left in place; versus bush hogging with a tractor, plus a truck and chipper, and two or three workers, string trimming, chain sawing and chipping...

“Maintenance” is often just a euphemism for biocide. The best way to destroy a school or community garden is to let a “maintenance crew” anywhere near it.

Well that picture made me sad..

Someone would say that it’s just a tree, but actually that is a living, basicly breathing thing. If they need to cut them down they could at least have some respect and do it how it is supposed to be done.. Like seriously, if there were no trees what would we breathe!?

”I just get paid to clear this area so I swing around with my dull knife so that living things get partly decapidated and might then hopefully die from sickness so I don’t have to come back and do it the right way”

Now I’m mad. Sorry about the rant. I’m having a rough day.

Sad indeed, and especially since the right tool for the job exists (it's even more scary than the bank mower but at least it's fit for purpose):



As long as the blades are reasonably sharp, these make clean cuts that heal over without stressing the trees. The council does this around the playing field next door to us every couple of years to keep the overhanging branches in check. No drama, quick and easy, and the end result looks like any other hedge.

Could have also been a Hydro-Ax. The link is to a video.

You can run the mower deck parallel to the ground which is slow. or slanted like in the video. I saw an operator who liked to raise the deck up over a tree up to 4 inch diameter and drop the deck down on the tree. The deck is very similar to a mower deck except that it's very much heavier duty steel. On one model I saw the "mower blades" are maybe 3/4 inch thick with no edge, just steel bars. They can throw a 3" diameter limb a foot or two long a hundred or more feet.

Sad. Probably done with a flail. They do hedges like that in the UK often, now. It's fast and easy for the worker to just drive along in the tractor with the flail arm, but bad for the trees because they're mangled rather than cleanly cut.

Kena Landry wrote:Have you ever seen anything like it? It's the same for hundreds of trees, and I have a hard time believing any of them can recover from that.

Could that be a valid and deliberate technique to stunt growth?

I agree, it's ugly as hell.

But allow me to play devil's advocate. What species of trees are we talking about? Some (like willows and alders alongside a river) would just keep growing, but be more spready in how they grow. This could actually create habitat and dense cover for small birds. The solid, living root structure would continue to be a significant factor in stabilizing the bank against erosion.

Certainly from what I see here, it does promote plenty of regrowth in flailed hedges. A few plants will die, most will regrow vigorously. Flailed hedges tend to be gappy, and sparsely leaved for the first few feet, then bushy on top. So they do provide habitat but they don't function as windbreaks and fencing the way hedges traditionally managed did. It's a very crude way of hedge management, done that way because it's cheaper and faster.

At least it's been done at the right time of year while the plants are dormant and before the birds start nesting.