Cutting down *all* the trees in your yard

[msnobody]

Our next door neighbor has cut down all the mature trees in his yard, with the last one, a beautiful tree, on the chopping block right now.
Can someone tell me what possesses someone to cut down *all* the trees in their yard?

[Jersey Girl]

Massive stupidity. Unless they were too diseased to be saved. Otherwise, yeah. Massive stupidity with a side of too lazy to rake leaves.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Why don’t you ask him, and then come back and share? I’d like to know, too. crap, man. I’ve planted 20 trees on my properties because, you know, they’re awesome.

- Doc

[Lem]

I have an elderly neighbor who, over the course of the past year or so, started talking about how LEAVES bothered them. The next thing I knew, there was a crane in their back yard, taking down a beautiful, giant oak. I was shocked. In addition to the loss of foliage, they lost the cover on their second floor deck that blocked sound and hot sun, and had given them years of pleasant privacy.

Shortly after that, my neighbor came over, and was extolling to my partner about the benefits of treeless yards. She paused, looked at my gorgeous oak in my front yard, and contemplatively said, 'the leaves must be so.... bothersome...'

I am in fear for my tree.

[msnobody]

Given the chance, I will ask.

[Jersey Girl]

I was thinking it was the leaves, too. Maybe they needed help raking and just didn't have any help. I dunno. I've never completely understood why folks rake leaves to start with.

We have our acres of forested property. We go over it once or twice a year with a tractor and lawn sweeper to take off a layer just in the defensible space around the house which amounts to a 30ft perimeter. The rest we leave to naturally decompose and feed the ecosystem.

It's compost.

[Jersey Girl]

Why don’t you ask him, and then come back and share? I’d like to know, too. crap, man. I’ve planted 20 trees on my properties because, you know, they’re awesome.

- Doc

Yes they are. I don't know about where you live, but down here where we live in a high altitude desert it takes decades for a tree to grow. Not so in the more humid/moist areas of the country.

[Moksha]

I had a huge tree blow over in my backyard this past summer. Trees come and go. If Dr. Midgley had planted some redwood saplings during that initial cricket infestation in Salt Lake, they would have died due to the climate.

[Gunnar]

Our next door neighbor has cut down all the mature trees in his yard, with the last one, a beautiful tree, on the chopping block right now.
Can someone tell me what possesses someone to cut down *all* the trees in their yard?

We used to have two mature and large Modesto ash trees in our backyard. Our current house is the same one my wife grew up in. We acquired it when her parents died after buying out her siblings' shares of the house that she and her siblings inherited when my in-laws died. The trees had been growing there since before her parents acquired the house, to which her father added a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom and a basement at the rear of the house, rather close to those trees, which continued to grow in both height and girth to the point that just a couple of years ago they were almost right up against back of the house and threatening to damage its foundation. In addition, the root systems had infiltrated our sewer lines, so we could no longer flush the back bathroom or drain the sink and the shower.

They were beautiful trees, and provided a lot of shade, but we had no choice but to remove them. Besides that, before we had to remove them, the shade they provided covered so much of our backyard for so much of the day that our backyard vegetable garden could no longer get enough sunlight to be productive. The vegetables we used to get from that garden were so much tastier than what we could buy at the grocery store, and we really missed them. Now we can grow vegetables in our backyard again.

So, removing trees is not always a bad thing. It is sometimes necessary. It is quite possible to have too many trees for a given area. Part of the reason California has had such a growing problem with wild fires in recent years is that, in addition to climate change, much of California's forest lands (especially the parts owned and managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management) have more trees per acre than is healthy for the amount of ground water available, due to a combination of under utilization and harvesting of our forest resources, and previous years of too successful suppression of naturally occurring fires.

[Jersey Girl]

. Part of the reason California has had such a growing problem with wild fires in recent years is that, in addition to climate change, much of California's forest lands (especially the parts owned and managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management) have more trees per acre than is healthy for the amount of ground water available, due to a combination of under utilization and harvesting of our forest resources, and previous years of too successful suppression of naturally occurring fires.

What you say is exactly true. We live in an old growth forest where majority of the pines are, rough estimate, 100 years old. This is why residents in Colorado devote themselves (we'd like to think) to mitigation and management of their forested property. We've been thinning trees here for probably 25 years. It does make for a healthier ecosystem with a reduced chance of crown fire in this dry climate. The work is labor intensive, that is for sure. It takes a whole day to fell one of these trees (cut it down, limb it, and either cut it into logs or chip it). We did at one point pay someone to take out a chunk of trees to expand the defensible space around the house. $200.00 per tree. Total of 14. When the big one behind the house landed on the ground it spanned the entire length of the house. I sat on the back porch and just cried over that one. But that is me.

I mourn trees.