Trunk Chopping for Improving Trees

Figure 1 - Five Trident Maples

The five Tridents were dug from a tree farm. They were in five-gallon containers, but had grown right through the containers, and the roots had bolted to the earth. With the roots firmly established in the ground, the roots had quickly grown extra large outside of the can, making removing the roots from the container very difficult. The plants were dug from the ground, can and all. (Figure 1)

Upon arriving home I inspected the trees and found that the root spread within the container was good and that the large portions of new wood were on the outside of the can. If I could just remove the outside portion of root wood and those roots, I might just be able to start the root ball over with what was in the can. The idea was to chop the root ball off at the can line or shorter. The cans were removed by splitting them and the root balls were inspected. It was decided that the root mass could be reduced by half with the initial chop. I cut straight thru the entire mass with a saw and removed half the roots from each tree. During the course of this article, three trees were treated the same. Pictures shown will be on individual trees and can be assumed that the treatment for each was the same.