I arrived home from work today and found a tree branch had been cut from the 40 foot tall honey locust in front of my house. The tree is growing from the parkway and so actually belongs to the city but I do mow, pick up sticks, shovel snow, plant daffodils & tulips, and otherwise maintain that space. It’s not a twig, at least an inch and a half and had obviously been cut with a saw. The ‘stump’ from the cut branch is at least 10, maybe 12 feet up. The branch is on the ground below the stump, right where you’d expect a branch cut with a pole saw would fall so not like it was a hazard to a car in the street parked under the tree. The wood looked healthy to my untrained eye.
I’m at a loss as to what might have happened. It wasn’t there this morning so must have occurred during daylight so I’ll ask my retired neighbor. In the meantime, any guesses?
Someone just cut the branch off and left it there? So I guess no one was trying to steal the wood.
All I can think of is that the branch was in somebody’s way. Is it possible that one of your neighbors had something delivered in a large truck, and the branch was blocking the truck from making a turn, pulling into a driveway, something like that?
Could have been blocking someone’s view, even to see if their favorite coffee shop had a line out the door or something like that. Also it may have been cut earlier but got hung up in the tree and jsut recentally fell down.
In our town, the town periodically trims the branches on parkway trees. My presumption is that they intend to reduce traffic impediments, tho their actions often defy explanation. But they generally have a chipper truck immediately follow the trimmers.
Any signs of trimming on other trees on the block? Did the branch overhang the street?
Was it the lowest branch on that side, and did it overhang the street? Where I live, there is supposed to be a 14’ clearance on the street side of a tree so that street-cleaning vehicles can pass under it without breaking branches off (or being forced to swing wide and therefore miss cleaning the curb).
p.s. I’m not sure what exactly you are calling a “parkway” but where I grew up, if there was a grassy strip between the street/curb and the sidewalk, we called it a “parking strip” for no apparent good reason. Interesting that the city owns that, we always treated it as our own, and when our old maple tree blew down in a storm, we planted new trees without thinking to consult the city.
I assume the city owns it. Still, it seems odd they would just cut it down and not dispose of it. In my town, the town owns the first ten feet inside the sidewalk and uses that space to blow snow onto. There is no strip between the sidewalk and the street (what I call a verge) as that would interfere with the town clearing the sidewalk, which they do with a small snowplow.
A guy sees a truck with two city workers moving along the street. Every 20 feet, they park, and one guys gets out, and digs a hole. The guy goes back to the truck, and they sit there for about 10 minutes. Then, the second guy gets out, fills the hole back in, gets back in the truck, and they drive another 20 feet.
After an hour of watching this, they guy finally can’t stand it, and goes over to ask what exactly it is they’re doing.
“Why, we’re planting trees!” says the first worker.
“What? No you’re not, you’re just digging and filling in holes!”
“Look, buddy it’s simple - it’s my job to dig the hole, it’s Bob’s job to put the tree in the hole, and it’s Charlie’s job to fill in the hole after the tree is placed!”
It’s most common for you to own the area for the curb, parkway, and sidewalk, but for the city to have an easement. That not only varies from city to city, it can vary within a city.
If a city is on top of things, they’ll perform scheduled tree maintenance. That includes evaluating trees and pruning them so that their future growth does not cause problems.
Our city stopped doing tree maintenance about 2008, due to financial difficulties. They may have resumed some with contractors, but for years the tree crew was too small to do more than emergency response only. Last month, on our street, a branch that had gotten too heavy not only fell off, it split downward, taking off about a third of the trunk. It was not a survivable injury.
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p.s. I’m not sure what exactly you are calling a “parkway” but where I grew up, if there was a grassy strip between the street/curb and the sidewalk, we called it a “parking strip” for no apparent good reason. Interesting that the city owns that, …
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That is what is generally called the parkway in the Chicago area.
As Yilaria notes, jurisdictions vary in terms of where your property line ends. Some end at the house end of the sidewalk, some at the curb, and some at the middle of the street. For the latter 2, various easements and duties of care pertain to the sidewalk/parkway/street.
I will say in Chicago, I’ve seen multiple instances of the city cutting down damaged branches and just leaving them there. Then some time later the chipper truck will come by and take them. As for why they do that, I couldn’t tell you.
Being serious, it’s probably an efficiency thing. Cutting branches probably takes more time per tree, particularly if the branch is high enough to need a ladder or cherry picker. Safety protocols alone would slow the cutters down quite a bit.
Putting the branch through the chipper is relatively a lot faster. I’ve done that myself in my back yard - cutting down a tree took a long time, but putting it through the woodchipper was much faster.
So they probably spend a few days cutting the trees, and then one day going around and chipping up the branches, or some such ratio. No point in having the chipping truck workers sitting around idle in between trees.
It wasn’t blocking any views or satellite dishes but good ideas. It was right above the parkway (strip between the sidewalk & street) so no street clearance issues. It was still there tonight. I didn’t get home till late after work tonight so I guess I’ll drag it back to the alley tomorrow evening. This morning in the light I’ll raise my estimate of the stump height to at least 12, maybe up to 15 feet.
Like some others said, the most likely is something the city did for some reason. I didn’t notice any other cut branches on the block. It also occurred to me that very few of my neighbors in shouting distance would have any reason to have a pole saw, anyway. The lots are typically 30 x 130 feet here and there aren’t many large trees private trees in yards; they’re all in the parkways.
Just another weird peculiarity, I guess. Here’s another one: Twice, someone has taken a bag of yard waste from the alley. I’ll mow on the weekend and put the paper yard waste bags out in the alley behind the garage, next to the garbage cans. When I go to take the trash out Tuesday morning, what had been two bags is now one. After a couple days in the heat, the bottom of the bags are wet and the contents stinky. I cannot begin to understand why someone would take a bunch of grass clippings, sticks, pulled weeds, etc from an alley.
They’re putting the contents (one bag worth) in their plastic lawn waste bin - and saving the bags for when they need to dispose of a large amount of lawn waste all at once. Leaf season is upon us!
Maybe, I don’t have a better theory. I’d thought grass wasn’t so hot for compost but I’ve never had a compost pile and don’t really know. The smaller lots around here I mentioned above mean few have large gardens, mostly a few tomatoes. Certainly, no one on the block (either side of the alley) has a big garden so someone is driving these gross bags away. And it’s not like bags of yard waste are rare during the summer so weird it’s happened twice.
Any chance the branch was cut at both ends? If so it is possible there was a bag worm “nest” or whatever it’s called. (Wikipedia says it’s called a case) I don’t know much about bag worms but I think the way they are dealt with is to cut the whole branch off. Possibly they cut the end with the nest off and took it elsewhere for burning or some other means of assured destruction.
Just wild speculation on my part.
It doesn’t seem to apply to this case, but sometimes trees are pruned to keep branches away from electrical wires. Along my path to work there are several large trees that have a big U pruned into their tops to make room for the wires.