Aside from grading and line-locating issues, the act of moving heavy equipment around trees compacts the soil so much that tree health is severely or fatally compromised in many instances.
Developments characteristically are named after flora and fauna that were eliminated in order to build them, or for creatures or geographical features that never existed there in the first place.
I used to drive past a subdivision that cleared all the land before construction. It was called Timber Ridge.
They did do a fairly decent job planting new trees after construction was done, but the irony remained.
Or maybe the price will be less than the other lots. I recently took down a tree in my yard. It wasn’t that old (less than 30 years). The reason I had it removed was because it killed off half my lawn ( the bare part grew every year along with the tree) and blocked any natural light from coming in through the windows. I have a small lot and I might have left a single tree on a larger lot- but if that tree had been there when I bought the house*, I would have considered the price of removing it when I made an offer. Now, it wouldn’t make much difference if it was one tree - but it might if it was a larger lot and ten trees.
We had to take down a rather large pin oak in our front yard earlier this year (it was dying from the center out.) We thought for sure it had to be at least 75-80 years old, but counting the rings on the stump proved it had been planted at the same time our house was built.
Looking at the old county aerial photos of my neighborhood, there hadn’t been trees in this subdivision since at least 1937 (it had been a farm.) Sometimes you get more trees than you started with.
While the above is generally true for new subdivision construction, for the reasons given, I’ve found that the opposite is true (at least around here) in established urban areas that have mature trees along the street or anywhere on the property. These trees have to protected when new construction occurs (which can be quite often in high-demand areas where smaller older houses are regularly replaced with McMansions). I’ve seen some of these construction sites with protective fencing around one or more large trees. I don’t know if the fencing is a municipal requirement, but I believe the fines for unauthorized destruction of mature trees are pretty hefty.
You misunderstood the name. It was really “TIMBERRRRR!!! Ridge”…
A friend of mine lived in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed area in the late 90s. He owned property and wanted to construct an aviary, which would require the removal of two mature trees.
In order to remove each tree, he had to plant two replacement trees, so he had to plant four trees and their location had to be approved by a board.
Sounds simple enough, but people with property large enough to allow trees to be planted knew how hard it was to get a planting site approved, so they charged hundreds-thousands of dollars for each tree planted on their land. The aviary was fully funded, but the tree planting sites took years for approval. In that time costs for lumber went up, so he ended up without an aviary.
They are; at least around these parts. I work in commercial landscaping and all those subdivisions get designed by a landscape architect. I mean, they’ll come up with maybe three versions of “North/East facing” and “South/West facing” and maybe the New Orleans style townhomes will be slightly different from the Georgia style townhomes. But the smattering of boxwoods and spireas and Stella D’Oro daylily were drawn out by a landscape architect. Not just townhomes either, single family homes in a new subdivision are treated the same. Fortunately, I haven’t had to handle one of those in years – it’s a real joy to have fifty different new home owners calling you and complaining or wanting different plants, etc when you’re just following what the LA drew on the plans.
Municipal code usually requires existing trees to be replaced by points with larger trees being progressively more valuable. So an existing 12" tree can be replaced by four 4" trees provided that the forestry office approves of the varieties. In those cases, it might be worth the hassle to preserve a large tree since you otherwise have both the expense and the additional land requirements to replace it with multiple smaller (but not too small) trees.
About four years ago I bought an eight acre wooded property with a log home on it. It has an acre sized pond and about 4 acres of cleared land that the previous homeowner bulldozed 15 years ago when he built the home. Two years before he sold it to me, the State sent a Forestry guy to his property who surveyed every plant and tree species he had on the property. They told him if he put back all the trees except an 1-1/2 acres around the home, they would cut his property taxes in half. So many people are buying large wooded acres, then cut everything down so the property looks like a golf course. They want to reverse that for the environment, and so small animals have a place to hide. This is a State Forestry program.
I am continuing what the previous homeowner started. I have to get rid of the invasive plants and trees, then plant 750 new trees of different oak species on a 10x10 grid. I am now a tree farmer who is putting things back as nature intended. It’s a good feeling, but lots of work because the deer keep eating many of them so they have to be replanted. Each tree is just a small sprig, so the cost is minimal. Getting a 50% cut on my taxes is even better.
Near the house I lived in during high school there was a tree that almost certainly was there when the subdivision was built, because it was in the way of the driveway coming straight out from the garage. Every other driveway you could drive straight into the garage assuming the door was in the front of the house, but for ours you had to turn about 20 degrees from the garage alignment to get to the driveway alignment. Learning to back out a car from that garage caused me to put a huge dent in the car in front of the wheel because I aligned with the driveway too quickly. My dad was not very happy about that. The car that I did get to drive though, I could keep parked in the driveway and it was out of the way of getting either of my parent’s cars out of the garage because backing out from one spot meant you had to go across the driveway before straightening out since to try to stay on your side of the driveway would mean doing what I did to the car.
So either that tree was there when the house was built, or they intentionally made the driveway go a weird direction and then planted a tree to make it look like they had to, or something else really silly.
We have something like that here, most of us have 2-car attached (or enclosed) garages. They then have a double-width driveway right to the street. Except for one: His driveway tapers from double width to single to avoid a fire hydrant. In the fifteen years I have been here, the hydrant has been replaced at least four times.
We had a City project here recently, where they were extensively re-doing a City park/sculpture garden. Including bulldozing a tree line of several-year-old trees. But they assured citizens that the designer had included replacement trees, and had specified fairly large replacements, not saplings. So the replacements were fairly expensive.
Since many of the replacements were in the same locations as the original trees, citizens suggested just leaving many of the originals there – as many of them were an outside border around the property, they wouldn’t have been that hard to work around. (The outside boundary was not being redone, just the interior.)
But then someone (a financial person) pointed out that tearing out the old trees and then replacing them at the end with big new trees would add a lot to the cost of the project. And the designer was paid a percentage of the total project cost. As was the general contractor. And the landscape designer. And the nursery supplier.
In fact, pretty much everybody involved had a financial incentive to do it this way. Except the city taxpayers, and they weren’t consulted.
One always seem to get the neighbour who would rather preserve the trees on your lot then let you build on it. They are more amenable when it’s a barren lot.
??? Pin Oaks rot from the top down and die if the soil conditions aren’t right, but there’s nothing wrong with hollowing out – all the strength of the tree is in the outer ring, and the center just makes it heavier.
Probably the eucalypts most resemble their native preferred roosts of Monterey pine and cypress in some important yet not obvious way, like preferred location or something. Here’s some ideas.
It’s important to remember that the abundance of monarchs in recent history is an artificial construct of human interference in the landscape, from changing land use patterns causing an increase in milkweeds (this began with Native Americans but greatly increased with farming and lumbering) to the provision of roosting trees in groves and plantations that didn’t exist before Western settlement.
Note that in addition to being not native and prone to invasive spreading in California, the kind of eucalypts with strips of dry peeling bark outside and volatile oils inside them, like bluegum, are quite the little firebugs (see Oakland, 1991). Cutting them down anywhere outside Oz is a good thing, and the butterflies can just deal with the loss of their human-introduced bounty.
At least some birds find them pretty congenial. Raptors seem to love them for whatever reasons, probably having to with the combination of high perches, decent cover, but semi-open under-stories with good line-of-sight. Anecdotally Red-shouldered hawks in particular seem plentiful in blue gum woodlands, but I see plenty of Cooper’s and Red-tailed hawks as well.
Orioles also seem to like to nest in them (and house wrens in the occasional cavities). Warblers, hummingbirds, tanagers and other nectar-happy birds also seem happy with them. I’ve seen a fair number of Brown Creepers and Chestnut-backed Chickadees working the trunks, which I don’t think they’d bother with if there was nothing to go after. And locally a surprising number of Red-shafted Flickers working the ground on the forest margins.
That said it IS a more limited community and a bit less diverse than a comparable native woodland. They’re not barren wastelands by any means - in breeding season I can find Bullock’s Orioles in a nearby mixed blue-gum woodland/open field park more consistently than anywhere else locally I can think of. But they’re probably not worth the fire hazard in most spots.
From local projects, I know that one main reason the trees are cleared is that they are often non-indigenous species that muscle out all other growth in the area. These trees also have a widespread root system that could damage pavements and lawns decades down the line. As a result, it is preferable to replace these trees by indigenous species with a root system that develops downwards, eliminating future problems.
We had branches coming down (a large one barely missed our neighbor’s car) and two different specialists told us the tree was dying.
Eh, the main person to make that decision is the Landscape Architect and they’re getting paid the same whether they draw a plan with the tree remaining or the draw a plan with the tree cut down and five new trees planted instead. The landscape contractor, nursery and arborist will make some money off of it but that makes no difference to the LA. It’s not as though the LA gets paid by the circle. The obvious exception would be if the firm doing the design and the firm doing the actual work were the same people. I’d assume, for a city project, they’d have it designed first and then go out for bids on that design.
The main reason why the LA would have designed it with replacements is because they were unsure how viable the existing trees would be and it’s easier to replace them all in one go (cheaper too since you’re not doing the process a bunch of times) than to have them decline over the course of years and need gradual replacement. Issues with root compaction or other construction related declines can take a few years to be evident. Or maybe nothing happened and the trees are fine but the LA was being more cautious than mercenary.
I question whether developers generally know which trees are “indigenous”.
There are plenty of native trees that tend to be shallow-rooted, including elm, maple and birch.
A major factor in how deeply tree roots grow is soil quality; heavily compacted soils like those left after home construction are more likely to promote shallow root growth.