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Topping/Shearing Trees/Shrubs, and Crepe-Murder

    Tree topping is an illegitimate practice because rather than preventing fallen limbs it encourages rapid growth of weakly attached water sprouts that are much more likely to break off, and opens the wood to fungal diseases and rot that weakens the overall structure and health of a tree, therefore in most cases the tree will have to be removed sooner rather than later.  A recent tornado in this are produced a similar effect so now I like to call this style tornado chic, but the storm also showed that removing the limbs so the don't break and fall on a house is pointless because the roof will probably be blown off at the same time. Pollard, which is aesthetically similar to topping, is only done on tolerant species like sycamore.

 

    Shearing results in a dense tangle of twigs at the surface of a shrub, which shades out any regenerative growth needed for a natural form that could be maintained at a specific size rather than incrementally increasing in size as is the case if sheared.  This results in a problem when a shrub becomes overgrown.

 

    Cutting crepe myrtles back to the same height every year, thus destroying the natural form.  This is commonly called crepe-murder, and it results from fallacies due to the linkage having myriads of repetitions people now erroneously believe that crepe myrtles must be done that way.  A better way would be cutting only a third of the branches each year so that the retention of an aesthetic form and the renewal necessary for abundant blooms are both achieve. 

 

Deforested/Denuded

    Site prep:  supposedly increasing the selling price of a lot by bulldozing either everything or leaving only a few spindly and often debarked "shade" trees.  Clear cuts, chert pits, and strip mines usually look better than site prep.

 

    Buying a wooded lot then cutting all of the trees on it when an adjacent cleared lot could have been purchased instead.

 

    Removing all trees and rocks before leveling a mountainside lot with “topsoil” from cotton field, where it was eroded away over a hundred years ago leaving only the red clay subsoil, and then planting grass and several large caliper trees in rows rather than just starting with a flat cotton field lot.

 

Erosion

    Building a pond with a spillway capacity less than that of the original stream, resulting in just normal rainfall washing away the dam.

 
    Denuding a steep slope especially if building a road or trail that crosses contour lines at an angle greater than 30^o, thus not going at least twice as far as it would take to go straight uphill resulting in runoff being so fast that all the disturbed soil is washed away.

 

Unnecessary Overkill

    Excessive mulch (over 3 inches deep) or fill dirt around mature trees out up to twice as far as the branches reach may smother roots and kill the tree.

 

    Fertilizer used on brown grass and bare areas will just be washed away by rain and end up in lakes helping grow aquatic weeds instead.