As Cass Turnbull told the story, “Soon after man emerged from his cave with his first cutting tool, he whacked a limb off a bush, and it felt good.” This initial act of what she termed “mal-pruning,” ...

An unsatisfactory approach to tree maintenance or pruning is “topping” it. Topping is the indiscriminant removal of branches of a tree above an arbitrary height, leaving unnatural, grotesque stubs and ...