Pruning of urban trees: the saga continues

Year after year, we watch these heartbreaking caricatures of urban trees

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Every year, around this time, the municipal arboricides come out, from the mountains up, to plow through the poor urban trees.

The photographs taken today could be those taken from last year, and the question is once again: can't anyone put an end to this sad spectacle?

Landscape architects are technicians, in principle, better able to deal with urban trees, parks and gardens, it is the essence of their university education and is – should be – one of the fundamental aspects of their professional life.

In almost all City Councils, there are these professionals today and I can't imagine a landscape architect agreeing with practices that harm the integrity of the plant material. So why aren't they in charge of maintaining green spaces?

Other technicians in the agrarian field are more induced to practices to shape the behavior of trees, sometimes drastically, in fruit production, for example. But not the landscape architects.

We all know that training pruning is carried out even in nurseries, to give the alignment trees (some species, not all) the appropriate size, and that the practice of deforming the ornamental grove remains (except in exceptional situations). It's out of fashion, except for some gardeners, the topiary…

Year after year, we watch these heartbreaking caricatures of urban trees; some City Councils seem to be incapable of taking on the task of renewing the urban trees, whether due to ignorance or carelessness when making decisions: it is better to have old, deformed trees and/or trees that are in inappropriate places uprooted and replaced. for new copies.

It should be up to the landscape architect to indicate which species is best suited to a given road situation, if it is a matter of alignment trees, because not all species adapt easily to this condition.

Now, planting any tree in any place, just because, and then having to apply this arboricide technique every year, is tremendous nonsense, which we never see removed from our municipal territories.