Tree Lopping in Golden Square Without Wrecking the Tree

When someone in Golden Square rings and asks for tree lopping, what they usually want is a smaller tree: less over the roof, less in the gutters, less to worry about when the north wind gets up. Fair enough. The trouble is that "lopping" also describes the crudest way of getting it, and the difference is between a tree that lasts and one that becomes a liability.

Lopping, topping and crown reduction: what the words mean

Topping is cutting main limbs back to stubs at whatever height looks about right, leaving no leaf-bearing branch below the cut. The tree cannot seal a wound like that. Decay works down into the stub, a crowd of fast, weak epicormic shoots springs from just below it, and within a few years you have a heavier, weaker canopy on rotting stubs. Sunscald on bark that was shaded a week earlier is common on gums, and the sudden loss of leaf area stresses a tree already coping with clay soil and a dry summer.

A crown reduction is what AS 4373, the Australian Standard for pruning amenity trees, actually describes. Each limb is shortened back to a lateral branch big enough to take over as its new end, generally at least a third of the diameter of the piece removed, with the cut placed just outside the branch collar so the tree can close it. Height and spread come down, the natural shape is kept, and every limb keeps enough foliage to feed itself. Done well, a reduction is hard to notice from the street by the following spring; done as topping, it is obvious for the rest of the tree's life. Our climbers are qualified for this and keep their skills current; the arborist training material at arbclub.ai gives a fair idea of what that involves.

Why so many Golden Square trees have outgrown their yards

The suburb was surveyed in the 1850s on the alluvial diggings along Bendigo Creek, and the miners' residence areas that followed were generous by today's standards. Most have since been subdivided, so the sugar gums and radiata pines planted for shade in the middle of a big yard now stand on the boundary of two small ones, a 1920s weatherboard one side and a newer unit the other. Cypress planted as a back-fence hedge is now a row of trees. Around the Golden Square Swimming Pool, the recreation reserve on Mackenzie Street and up the rise toward Golden Gully, remnant grey box and yellow gum sit on shallow rocky soil that leaves them prone to summer dieback and limb drop.

Two local things push people toward lopping. Powerlines run along most of the older streets and a service line often crosses the yard, so canopies get cut hard around them. And the ground is variable: flattened mullock, old fill and Ordovician clay with buckshot gravel, so a big tree's roots can be shallower than its size suggests. In both cases a measured reduction, taking weight off the long limbs over the roof and the line, beats a flat-top haircut. Where a tree contributes to a heritage precinct, keeping it at a sensible size is also what the City of Greater Bendigo generally prefers, and we check the overlay before quoting.

What a Golden Square crown reduction includes

A typical lopping call-out in Golden Square

Picture a sugar gum on the shared boundary of a subdivided block a few streets back from Maple Street, topped maybe fifteen years ago and regrown into a dense head of long upright shoots leaning over both roofs. We thin the regrowth to a handful of the soundest leaders, reduce those to laterals so height and spread come down by a couple of metres, and take the weight off the two limbs over the carport. The tree looks like a tree afterwards, not a hat stand, and is booked for a lighter follow-up in a few years.

For finer work without changing the size, see tree pruning in Golden Square. If the tree is past saving, tree removal in Golden Square covers how we get big trees out of small yards, stump included. We reduce trees the same way for tree lopping in Kangaroo Flat next door and tree lopping in Bendigo proper. The main tree lopping page has more on the standard we work to, and the Golden Square page lists everything else we do in the suburb.

Golden Square tree lopping questions