TreePeople’s Offer Gets to the Root of Pruning Feud

‘There was a canopy of trees before. Now, they look like stalks of celery.’

Huston Curtiss

Cartwright Avenue homeowner

The TreePeople are extending an olive branch to end the perennial war between homeowners and Los Angeles city tree trimmers.

Leaders of the Studio City-based nonprofit environmental group have volunteered to teach city workers how to prune the city’s 680,000 curb-side trees without ruining their leafy look.

Homeowners often protest the city’s trimming technique, which is designed to make trees safe at minimal cost. Workers whack tons of limbs at a time from rows of parkway trees in the hope that the pruning will last at least seven years.

The most recent outcry came last week when trimmers visited Toluca Lake to thin out eucalyptus trees along Cartwright Avenue.

“The trees are destroyed,” complained homeowner Huston Curtiss, who has five of them in front of his house. “There was a canopy of trees before. Now, they look like stalks of celery.”

Curtiss said he confronted workers who cut back branches of one tree almost to its trunk.

“They laughed and said it was the man’s first tree, that he had to learn somewhere,” Curtiss said.

“They destroyed a 25-year-old tree. It will probably die. It was the most incompetent group I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Curtiss, a television writer and playwright, complained to city officials and to TreePeople.

Afterward, TreePeople managing director Mary Greenstein offered the trimming lessons to Robert Kennedy, chief of the city’s street tree division.

“There are good ways and bad ways to prune,” Greenstein said. “The city budget for street trees is always the first one to get cut. We’re offering to provide professional arborists and others to teach the crews for free.”

She said the trimming tips, which could be delivered in person or through videotapes, would cover such topics as where to cut limbs and how to thin branches while leaving an aesthetic amount of foliage. Such a trimming could last just as long as the ones done by the city, she said.

Kennedy said he is willing to discuss the offer further with the environmentalists. But, he said, he is doubtful that they can provide teachers any better qualified than his own tree trimmers.

“We have more experience than anyone they could bring in,” Kennedy said. “We have 120 guys who trim 67,000 trees a year.”

Twelve city-supervised private contractor crews prune another 30,000 of the city’s trees, he said. The pruning costs the city from $110 to $115 per tree, whereas private contractors charge about $400 a tree.

Kennedy said the Cartwright Avenue trees were thinned out because they were too heavy for their supporting roots, which were recently cut back to make room for a new curb on the street.

The crew of trimmers was watched over by one of the city’s most experienced tree surgeons, he said.

“If it was the trimmer’s first tree, he probably had the surgeon with him guiding him around,” Kennedy said.

“That one tree was taken down more than I would have taken it down. But I wasn’t in the tree. It may have had a lot of deadwood or decay, and they might have had to bring it down more.”

Curtiss was unmoved by that explanation.

“I’d like to get out of L.A.,” he said. “The ignorance here is intolerable.”