Who Butchered the Trees in the Woodlands Country Club?

A row of trees between Sections One and Seven on Bayberry Lane

By Sharon Aron Baron

You would have to be blind not to notice someone went chainsaw-happy on some of the trees in the Woodlands. Take a look for yourself; trees on our golf course have been butchered into shapes that don’t exist in nature.

Was ClubLink Corp, owner of the golf course, trying to save money by not hiring a tree specialist?

Maybe there was some electrical line to avoid that warranted rows of trees to be hacked into these odd shapes?

Over a year ago, I saw hat-racked trees along Commercial Boulevard in front of Section two. FPL butchered the trees out front in this same fashion, making them appear mushroom-shaped.   I’m not optimistic about what came next, but someone complained, and FPL pulled the trees and planted much nicer ones in their place.

I looked closer today and noticed that the electrical lines were so far above the trees that the limbs would never have reached one of those lines. Why would FPL even need to cut them like this?

When I was a resident of Davie, if you trimmed your tree like this or “hat-racked” it, you would either pay a fine or replace the tree, depending on the damage. The Town of Davie was very serious about tree quantities per lot, and they especially didn’t like residents butchering their canopy trees.

Hat-Racked Tree on Bayberry Drive

According to the Miami Herald, Hat-racking, a technique employed by some of South Florida’s tree trimmers, removes all limbs (100 percent of the canopy) above an arbitrarily drawn line. Hat-racking is a damaging and sometimes deadly pruning process. Removing a healthy, vigorous tree’s canopy has consequences beyond cosmetic damage.

A hat-racked tree loses all its ability to make food since its green, chlorophyll-containing food factories, the leaves, are removed. The tree is then forced to use its stored energy in the trunk and roots to re-foliate. Using up stored energy is never good. Sometimes the tree is so depleted that it can never fully recover and may often go into decline and die.

I showed the photo of the tree to C. Way Hoyt, Owner and Certified Arborist Tree Trimmers & Associates, Inc., who assessed the damage:

The photo you sent shows a tree that appears to have been over-thinned, as well as topped. Both over-thinning and topping are detrimental to the tree because they stress the tree health-wise, and the removal of too many interior limbs forces all subsequent growth the ends of the branches and results in water sprouts, tip-weighted limbs (prone to failure), sunburn, and poor growth.Trees that are topped result in new sprouts that are weakly attached and prone to failure.

Both over-thinning and topping are not in conformance with the American National Standards Institute A 300 pruning standards. These standards have been adopted by the Broward County Commission and mandated for all 31 cities in Broward.  Pruning that is not in conformance with these standards is a violation of City and County standards and may result in fines, forced tree removal, and replacement trees required.” – Way Hoyt, Owner and Certified Arborist Tree Trimmers & Associates, Inc.

Most tree trimmers try to persuade homeowners to let them hat-rack their trees under the pretense that they are making their trees hurricane-proof. These trees are more likely to have broken limbs in a windstorm than the ones that have been pruned correctly.

Whoever is responsible needs to fire “Edward Scissorhands” and hire a real arborist.

These trees are unsightly, and this brutal botchery of tree trimming looks like a chainsaw massacre.