Tree topping
Also called: topping, hat-racking, heading cuts, tipping, rounding over, stubbing, pollarding vs topping
Cutting the main limbs and leader of a tree back to stubs to reduce its height. The cheapest way to shorten a tree and the most damaging: the stubs decay, weak sprouts regrow faster than the limbs, and it needs cutting again in 2–3 years. Prohibited by ANSI A300.
Topping looks like a solution: a tree has gotten too tall for the yard, the wires or the view, so a crew cuts every major limb off at a chosen height and leaves a hat rack of stubs. It’s fast, it needs no climbing skill, and it’s cheap. What happens next is why arborists refuse it. The stubs are cut in the middle of a limb, nowhere near a branch collar, so the tree can’t seal them, and decay enters each one and works down. Deprived of most of its leaves, the tree responds with survival growth: dozens of water sprouts from dormant buds just below each cut, weakly attached to the outer wood, growing 3–6 feet a year. Within two or three years the tree is as tall as before, with a crown of poorly attached shoots on decaying stubs — more hazardous than the original, uglier, and in need of cutting again. Repeated toppings kill the tree over a decade or so; a topped tree is also a defect on an inspection and a liability if a sprout limb fails.
The legitimate way to make a tree shorter is crown reduction: cutting each limb back to a lateral branch at least a third the diameter of the limb removed, so growth continues from an existing branch instead of from sprouts, with the total kept under a quarter of the live crown. It costs $200–$1,200 per tree because it’s slow and skilled, and it doesn’t reduce the height as much as topping. If the tree really needs to be half its size, the honest answer is usually removal and a smaller species. Pollarding — the European practice of cutting young trees back to the same points every year or two — is a different, deliberate system started when the tree is young and maintained forever; it isn’t topping a mature tree.
Any company that offers topping, or shows topped trees in its photos, is the wrong company for a tree you’re keeping; the hiring guide lists it as the first red flag, and the cost page prices reduction as the alternative.