What Tree Loppers Do

tree loppers Gold Coast are the most useful tool in your pruning arsenal. Tree loppers uses long handles which lets you reach far and exert high leverage with minimal exertion, letting you comfortably cut anything that can fit entirely between the blades when open. Typically, this includes wood of up to one inch in diameter or somewhat more, but for most of your cuts on much smaller wood, you’ll prefer the accuracy and one-handedness of pruners over loppers.  When a tree is lopped, most or all of the leaves are removed. The trees’ food source is removed. Leaves create and store starches and carbohydrates which the tree consumes and converts into energy. By removing the leaves, you are removing the main food stores and forcing the tree to rely on reserve stores further down the tree. These stores are finite and will become depleted if drawn upon too often. Lopping is the indiscriminate cutting of tree branches to stubs or lateral branches that are not large enough to assume the terminal role. Other names for lopping include “topping, heading,” “tipping,” “hat-racking,” and “rounding over.”  The most common reason given for tree loppers Gold Coast is to reduce the size of a tree. Often homeowners feel that their trees have become too large for their property. People fear that tall trees may pose a hazard. Lopping, however, is not a viable method of height reduction and certainly does not reduce the hazard. In fact, lopping will make a tree more hazardous in the long term.

There are 2 very specialized forms that tree loppers do are accepted in the arboricultural community and these are:

Pollarding

Pollarding is a special form of pruning which involves pruning off regrowth at regular intervals.
This pruning occurs commonly at intervals of 1-2 years. Extending the pruning interval any longer increases the risk of branch failure. It is very important to understand that pollarding is only acceptable if a young tree has been specially selected to receive this treatment. Pollarding can be used to manage the risk associated with a large tree that has been previously lopped.

Hedging

It does not occur to most people that hedge trimming is in fact, a form of lopping. When trimming a hedge, you are indiscriminately cutting stems in between branch unions the very definition of lopping.

All previously mentioned results of lopping occur after trimming a hedge:

• Vigorous regrowth.
• Poorly attached unions.

But is considered an acceptable practice because of the way hedges are generally kept. Hedges are generally pruned/trimmed every 1-2 years, sometimes every 6 months. It is this frequent trimming that prevents the new shoots from growing out of control and failing under their own weight.

Many who do tree loppers say it is unsafe because the new branches that grow from epicormics buds to replace those lost by the lopping have weak attachment. There is no mechanism in tree growth that will attach these shoots to the older pre-existing wood. Failure may also occur as the result of decay expanding into the wood from the lopping wounds.