Tree Lopping in Epsom Done as Crown Reduction

The older half of Epsom, the blocks that were here before the estates arrived along the Midland Highway, is where the lopping calls come from. These were farmlets or market gardens with a few big trees left for shade, and forty years on those trees loom over extensions, sheds and the new neighbours' fences. Here is how we handle it.

What a typical Epsom lopping job looks like

The call usually goes like this. A couple in one of the streets between Howard Street and the railway have a big yellow gum in the back corner. Somebody topped it a decade ago with a chainsaw off a ladder, and it has come back as a broom of thick vertical shoots off each flat cut, twice as dense and now brushing the gutter of the new pergola. Every hot northerly across the flats brings one of those shoots down. They want it lower, and they want the dropping to stop.

On the day, the climber works the crown from the outside in. Each old topping stub is inspected; the regrowth on most is attached to a ring of decayed wood and is why limbs keep failing, so we thin the weakest shoots out entirely and reduce the survivors back to a well-attached side branch. The canopy comes down and in, following the tree's natural outline rather than a straight line at gutter height, every cut made to a lateral that can take over as the new growing point. By the end the gum is noticeably smaller, opened up to let wind through, and the pergola has clear air. The brash is chipped on the nature strip and the owners keep the mulch. Half a day, three of us.

Why we will not top a tree in Epsom

Topping, which is what most people mean by lopping, cuts a branch or trunk off at a random point with no side branch to take over. The tree responds with epicormic shoots from buds under the bark: fast-growing, weakly attached to the outside of the stub, sitting on wood that is rotting from the cut inward. Within a few years the tree is taller, denser, heavier at the tips and far more likely to shed a limb. That is the tree in the story above, and there are plenty of them on Epsom's older blocks.

Crown reduction under AS 4373, Pruning of Amenity Trees, works the other way. Height and spread are reduced by cutting back to living laterals large enough to carry on as the leader, cuts are placed at the branch collar so they seal, and the amount removed is kept to what the species can recover from in a season. A reduced gum still looks like a gum, and it needs revisiting less often because it is not racing to replace what was hacked off. If a tree cannot be reduced enough to make it safe, we say so; our tree removal in Epsom page explains that job.

The Epsom conditions that shape a reduction

Wind with nothing to break it. Epsom is flat, cleared and open to the north. Trees on the older blocks grew up with paddocks around them and never developed the tight crowns of a bush tree, so a full-sized yellow gum or sugar gum out here is an enormous sail in a storm. Reductions in Epsom focus as much on thinning the outer crown as on lowering height.

Heavy clay that sits wet. The Epsom flats are red-brown loam over heavy clay that waterlogs through winter, and some species respond with shallow, spreading root plates. A tall crown on shallow roots is a lever in wet ground, so taking weight off the top is often the middle path between doing nothing and removing a healthy tree.

Old cypress rows and peppercorns. Windbreak cypress from the farming years are frequently the subject of a lopping call, and they are the one group where the honest answer is often no: a conifer cut into brown wood will not regrow, so a heavy reduction leaves a permanent bare frame. Hedge trimming in Epsom covers what can be done with the younger, still-green rows.

New estate trees. The ornamental pears, claret ash and crepe myrtles in Barlow Hills, Elmwood and Willowbank are too young for reduction. What they need is formative shaping, described on the tree pruning in Epsom page. Overhead lines are mostly an older-street issue too, since the estates run underground power; any crown near the highway-frontage lines is worked to the clearance rules.

How an Epsom tree lopping job runs

1. Site look. An arborist walks around the tree with you, looks at the old cuts, the decay, the targets underneath and how the wind loads it, then explains what a reduction can and cannot achieve.
2. Overlay check. Pruning to the standard generally needs no permit, but if the property carries a planning overlay we confirm what is allowed with the City of Greater Bendigo before quoting.
3. Fixed quote. One written price covering the climb, the chipping and the clean-up. No day rate.
4. The climb. Reduction is rope work in the crown and cannot be done properly from the ground. Our climbers keep their tickets and aerial rescue practice current, the sort of training covered by arborist lesson resources.
5. Finish and walk-through. Material chipped or removed, the lawn raked, and a chat about when the tree should next be looked at, which for most reduced gums in Epsom is three to five years.

The same crew does reductions in Huntly across the creek, in White Hills and the rest of Bendigo down the highway, and out through Eaglehawk. The full approach is on the main tree lopping page, or start at the Epsom suburb page.

Epsom tree lopping, asked and answered