Pruning prudence

The grand trees of Baton Rouge must grow past a gauntlet of urban peril to reach their impressive heights.

Roadside ditches. Surrounding concrete. Our city’s web of pipes and sewer lines.

But the primary threat to our canopy of green comes from man, and that’s improper pruning.

Even mature trees can survive hurricane-force winds, provided they are properly and systematically pruned and their roots periodically fortified with water and fertilizer.

There are plenty of burly guys who’ll come and hack out dead wood from your trees for a couple hundred bucks. Rarer are reputable arborists with the proper training.

These professionals regard trees as the hulking, complex organisms they are before they prune the first branch.

They consider a tree’s age, size and shape, the array of its limbs and branches, even its genetics. “Every branch, every stem, holds energy for the tree,” says Terry Robertson, a DeRidder arborist who’s also president-elect of the Louisiana Arborists Association.

He ponders a tree’s shape and tries to predict in what pattern it will grow over the next three to five years. Only then does he begin judiciously pruning the tree, removing dead and diseased limbs, selecting central vertical limbs and establishing important branches for future strength and stability.

Every tree is different. “Older trees might take less time; younger trees might take more time to study the tree,” he says.

A job well done in his line of work means going unnoticed.

“The best compliment you can get is for a homeowner to say, ‘It looks good. What did you do?’” Robertson says. “You really don’t recognize what you did, because it’s not butchered. If it looks like you did something, you did too much.”