06/17/2026
“It Depends”
This is one of my many arboreal sayings I like to use and I often say it’s the only thing we can say about trees that’s true 100% of the time.
The reality is tree care (well, good tree care anyway) is incredibly nuanced and can be complicated.
I’ve been thinking a lot about wind loading and how trees respond to that lately so here’s a few examples just in that one topic.
What does the built environment do to the wind? (Venturi Effect, Buffering etc)
How does the species impact the wind loading? (Flexibility, compressive strength, leaf size and shape, canopy density, oscillation etc)
How do nearby trees impact the wind loading? This includes your neighbors trees!
For example there’s horse chestnut where the smallest twigs might be .5-1 centimeters with large palmately-compound leaves and relatively stiff wood, or a birch where the smallest twig might be a few millimeters and small simple leaves and very flexible wood, just to compare two species.
This only a small part of the thought process and by no means exhaustive. (There’s also tree height, canopy area, branch architecture and attachment to consider, branch and stem taper, root structure and much more…)
How do those leaves dissipate energy? Deformation to reduce drag? Rapid fluttering to dissipate energy?
Those things will (or at least should) inform how you prescribe and apply pruning for the trees.
And we are always trying to do things FOR the trees rather than TO the trees. Of course we are trying to coexist with trees so much of what we do is human centric.
True arboriculture is so much more than “your tree needs trimmed”. It is an art and a science.
