The sweat was stinging my eyes, a sharp, salty reminder that in St Marys feels vastly different from at the coast. It’s a dry, aggressive heat that bakes the red clay until it cracks like old porcelain. I was standing in a backyard that smelled of scorched grass and petrol, watching Gary point a calloused finger at a Spotted Gum that looked less like a tree and more like a coat rack designed by a committee of sadists.
, Gary had paid a man with a ladder and a thirst for destruction to “tidy it up.” The man had lopped it. He’d taken a chainsaw to the main vertical stems, flat-topping the crown as if he were giving a recruit a buzz cut. Now, Gary was looking at the result-a frantic, bushy explosion of thin, vertical shoots erupting from the stubs-and asking me why the tree looked so “angry.”
I took a breath. My chest felt tight, probably because I’d spent the morning crying at a commercial for a brand of long-life milk that featured a lonely grandfather. It was pathetic, I know. But that raw emotional state makes you hyper-aware of tragedy, and looking at this tree was a tragedy in slow motion. The lopping hadn’t “saved” the tree from being too tall; it had triggered a biological panic response that was now costing Gary 16 times more in maintenance than a proper prune ever would have.
The Anatomy of Scarcity and Control
In Western Sydney, we have this obsession with control. We see a tree reaching for the power lines or casting a shadow over the solar panels and our first instinct is to shorten it by force. But a tree is not a hedge. When you lop a branch, you aren’t just shortening it; you are removing the terminal bud, the “brain” of the limb that regulates growth.
Without that regulator, the tree enters a state of emergency. It dumps every remaining scrap of energy into dormant buds just under the bark, sending out hundreds of “epicormic shoots.” These are those long, spindly, vertical branches Gary was now staring at. To the untrained eye, they look like healthy new growth. To anyone who understands the physics of wood, they are 466 ticking time bombs.
Growth Physics
These shoots are not integrated into the heartwood of the tree. They are essentially glued onto the outer layer of bark. As they grow-and they grow incredibly fast, sometimes in a single season-they become heavy. Because their attachment is superficial, they are prone to snapping off in the slightest breeze. By trying to make the tree “safer” by lowering its height, Gary had actually created a monster that was now shedding 26-kilogram limbs every time the wind picked up from the south.
The Theory of Epigenetic Mourning
I thought about Ella R.J., a seed analyst I’d met at a conference in Richmond . She spends her days in a lab with 106 climate-controlled drawers, staring at the microscopic architecture of Australian flora. Ella has this theory-unproven but compelling-that trees subjected to the trauma of lopping produce seeds with altered chemical signatures.
“
She calls it “epigenetic mourning.” She showed me data from 46 separate batches of seeds collected from lopped versus unlopped Eucalypts. The seeds from the lopped trees were smaller, their germination rates 16 percent lower.
– Ella R.J., Seed Analyst
It’s as if the parent tree, in its struggle to survive the mutilation, sends a chemical message to its offspring: The world is a violent place; don’t bother waking up.
The Real Cost of False Safety
Most people don’t see the violence. They see a “clean” backyard. They see the $676 they saved by hiring a guy who doesn’t carry insurance instead of a qualified arborist. But the butcher’s bill always comes due. Within , the decay from those flat-top cuts travels down into the main trunk.
Because the tree can no longer seal the wound-a process arborists call compartmentalization-the heartwood begins to rot. It becomes a hollow shell, a 1906-kilogram pillar of instability standing from your children’s bedroom.
The price of a cheap haircut: Impatience is a tax that compounds over time.
The Error of Intervention
I’ve made the mistake of intervening when I should have observed. Not with trees, but with people. I once tried to “fix” a friend’s grieving process by offering 6 different logic-based solutions to her heartbreak. I thought I was pruning the dead weight of her sorrow.
In reality, I was lopping her. I was cutting off her natural crown and forcing her to grow back in a way that was frantic, weak, and ultimately more dangerous for her long-term stability. We do this because we can’t sit with the height of things. We can’t handle the scale of a tree’s ambition or a human’s pain, so we cut it down to a size we find manageable.
The tragedy of Gary’s backyard is that the industry knows better. Every arborist association from here to London condemns lopping. It is illegal in parts of Europe and frowned upon by anyone who has ever cracked a textbook on silviculture. Yet, in the suburbs surrounding Penrith, the sound of the “lopper” is the soundtrack of every Saturday morning.
It is a cycle of ignorance fueled by a desire for a quick fix. If you find yourself staring up at a canopy that feels overwhelming, the solution isn’t a butcher’s blade. You need a professional who understands that a tree is a living system, not a structural hazard to be decapitated. When people realize the danger they’ve put themselves in, they often reach out to specialists like Penrith Tree Removal to fix the mess left behind by amateurs.
Ella R.J. once told me that if you listen to a forest after a storm, you can hear the trees adjusting. They aren’t just swaying; they are recalibrating their internal tension. Wood is a dynamic material. It grows thicker where the stress is highest. When you lop a tree, you destroy its ability to self-calibrate.
Infrastructure
The Lottery
You remove its mechanical integrity and replace it with a frantic, desperate attempt to stay alive. It’s the difference between a person who has spent building a career and a person who has spent winning the lottery; one has the infrastructure to handle the weight, and the other is just holding on for dear life.
The 26 Centimeter Reality
I walked over to the base of Gary’s tree. The ground was littered with 56 small, dead twigs. I picked one up. It snapped with a dry, hollow sound. I explained to Gary that the decay had likely already traveled 26 centimeters into the main stem.
To save the tree, we’d have to perform restorative pruning-a slow, expensive process that would take at least to see results. Or, we’d have to remove it entirely.
“But I thought I was helping it,” Gary said. His voice was small. He reminded me of the grandfather in that milk commercial, and I felt that ridiculous lump in my throat again.
“We often think we’re helping when we’re actually just asserting control,” I said. It sounded more profound than I intended, but that’s what happens when you’re sleep-deprived and emotionally raw. We look at a gum tree and we see a threat.
We don’t see the 16 species of insects that live in its bark, or the way it cools the surrounding ground by 6 degrees during a heatwave. We just see something that doesn’t fit into our neat, 606-square-metre suburban dream.
The Irony of Resilience
The irony is that trees are remarkably forgiving until they aren’t. A tree will suffer the indignity of a lopping for , , or even , quietly rotting from the inside out while putting on a brave face of green, epicormic leaves.
Then, on a Tuesday afternoon with no warning, it will give up. The physics of the rot will finally overcome the physics of the growth, and the tree will return to the earth, often taking a fence, a car, or a roof with it.
I think about the $856 Gary spent on the initial lop. It seemed like a bargain at the time. Now, the quote for removal and stump grinding was sitting at $2456. That’s the real cost of a “cheap” haircut. It’s a tax on impatience. It’s the price we pay for refusing to understand the biology of the world we live in.
But life doesn’t work in 2-dimensional planes. You cannot have the crown without the roots, and you cannot have the safety without the structural integrity. As I left Gary’s house, I saw a seedling pushing through a crack in the driveway. It was tiny, maybe 6 millimeters tall.
I thought about Ella R.J. and her seeds of mourning. I wondered if this little sprout carried the memory of the chainsaw, or if it was starting fresh, unaware of the butcher’s blades that waited in the tool sheds of St Marys.
I sat in my truck for before starting the engine. I thought about the commercial I’d seen that morning. The old man wasn’t just lonely; he was forgotten. He was a lopped tree in a world of manicured hedges.
Beheading Our Collective Future
We treat our elders like we treat our trees-we cut them back until they are manageable, until they no longer cast shadows over our convenience, and then we wonder why they lack the strength to stand against the wind.
If we want a canopy in Western Sydney that survives the next , we have to stop beheading our future. We have to learn that a tree’s height is its strength, not its flaw. We have to stop hiring the man with the ladder and the $366 special.
We have to start seeing the tree for the complex, 3-dimensional organism it is, rather than the 2-dimensional problem we want to solve. I started the truck. The dashboard thermometer read now. The heat shimmered off the asphalt, making the horizon look like it was melting.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Gary standing under his lopped gum tree, a small figure dwarfed by a giant he had accidentally broken. He looked tired. I felt tired. It’s exhausting, this business of trying to control things that were meant to be wild.
Maybe next time I see a commercial about a grandfather, I won’t cry. Or maybe I’ll cry harder, realizing that the “haircuts” we give the world are just reflections of the haircuts we give ourselves-short, brutal, and utterly lacking in the grace required to grow tall.
We need to leave the crown alone. We need to let the branches reach for the power lines and then, with precision and care, guide them back rather than cutting them off. It’s slower. It’s more expensive. But it’s the only way to ensure that when the storm comes-and in Western Sydney, the storm always comes-we have something left to stand under.
The drive home took . I passed 16 different properties with lopped trees. Each one felt like a personal failure, a message I hadn’t delivered clearly enough. We are a species that loves to prune, but we have forgotten how to nurture. We have the tools of gods and the foresight of toddlers.
As I pulled into my own driveway, I looked at the old Eucalypt in my yard. It was messy. It dropped leaves in the gutters. It was of unpredictable biology. I grabbed my water bottle, walked over to it, and poured the last 6 ounces of water onto its roots. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t a chainsaw either. Sometimes, the most radical thing you can do for a tree is absolutely nothing at all.