The Gilmans on Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park
The Gilmans' Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house on the St. John's River in Jacksonville
give you the strongest and most stable tree. But I got a
great question from an arborist at a recent conference:
"What about when you have to plant in a strip or cut-
out in the sidewalk where you don't want the pavement
disturbed or raised? That reality and the desire to have
straight roots at the surface are in conflict." That 's the
conundrum to work on.
We also need studies on the economic consequences of
pruning practices. When we're running specs for contrac-
tors, what specs should we include for the long term, to save
money? How can we use our pruning dollars most efficient-
ly? A lot of us can go up to a tree and prune it to improve
its architecture, but there's no real dollar value assigned to
that. In that same vein—and this would take 10 or 15 years
to get a handle on—we should measure waste and lost car-
bon. One hypothesis I'd love to test is, does keeping low
branches in check so that eventually you remove them when
they're still small—does that strategy result in more carbon
stored in the tree?
What we're doing now is waiting too long to apply the first
pruning. As a result, contractors have two options: they can
make big pruning cuts to remove the low branches, leaving
big wounds—or, they can prune out secondary branches and
leave big branches—and then your branch structure's not
20 City Trees
