Pollarding / Coppicing
Many people object to this type of tree work, unless done from commercial motives which is rarely the case these days, as grotesque, and in the vast majority of cases it is an unassailable fact that an elegant fully mature lime, the tallest of all broad-leaved European trees, is of considerably more aesthetic and intrinsic value than a five metre stump. As Edgar Allen Poe once remarked, however, “there is no true beauty without some strangeness of proportion”, and the row of trees below seem to be exactly the sort of thing that he was talking about.
Aesthetic issues aside, if a pollarded tree is left to grow indefinitely it will be significantly less stable than one which has been left to grow as nature intended. Many people opt for a middle ground, keeping the crown of an old pollard to a manageable and safe size, or else having trees cut back on about a ten year cycle, thereby reducing the amount of time with an objectionably ‘stumpy’ tree on their property to a few years.
This large Ash had a large limb fail in a storm. Both of us were keen to preserve the tree if possible and so we cut it right back to take a lot of the weight out and to allow the tree to come back.
A similar example was a long row of Poplar’s that started to have large limb fail. We pollarded them back to help prevent this and to allow sunlight through to the ground below to create a wild habitat.