Cutting A Canopy Back Properly

What lopping actually means here

Lopping is heavier canopy work than pruning: reducing the overall weight, height or spread of a tree that has got too big for where it is standing. The classic South West job is a marri or lemon-scented gum planted three metres from the house in the 1980s that now sits over the roof line, drops limbs onto the carport and fills the gutters every autumn.

The right version of that job is reduction to sound points — cutting back to a lateral branch that can take over as the new leader, leaving the tree with a balanced shape and the ability to seal the wound. The wrong version is topping: a flat cut across the crown at whatever height the bucket reached, leaving stubs that die back and sprout a mass of shoots attached to nothing but bark. Those shoots grow fast, look fine for three years, and then start failing in exactly the weather you were worried about.

Why it matters more with local species

Marri and jarrah are slow to compartmentalise a large wound. A badly placed cut on a mature marri will sit open and bleed, and decay follows. Peppermint responds to heavy cutting with dense regrowth that makes the canopy heavier and more sail-like — precisely the wrong outcome on a coastal block at Dunsborough or Broadwater where the afternoon sea breeze is the force you are trying to reduce. Reducing end weight on the windward limbs works far better than shortening everything uniformly.

The process

1. Inspection. The whole tree, base to tips — root plate, trunk, unions, deadwood, any fungal activity, and how it sits relative to the house, the fence and any lines.
2. Drop zone assessment. What is under each limb, what has to be protected, whether sections are lowered or dropped, where the chipper parks.
3. The cuts. Selected limbs reduced or removed at defensible points, deadwood out, the shape checked from the ground as it goes rather than at the end.
4. Clean-up. Chipped, raked, chip left or carted.

When to reduce and when to remove

Reduction buys years on a tree with a manageable defect: a heavy over-extended limb, a canopy leaning toward the house, a tree that has simply outgrown a courtyard. It does not fix a decayed trunk, a lifted root plate or a torn union through the main stem. If that is what is in front of us, removal is the honest recommendation and we will say so rather than sell you a reduction that postpones the problem by two seasons.

Lighter work — crown lifting over a driveway, deadwooding, clearance from the roof — sits under tree pruning. Fire-driven limb work around a rural house is covered on the firebreaks page.

For pricing factors see the cost guide, or ring (08) 9785 0207 and describe the tree. Crews run across Bunbury, Busselton, Margaret River and surrounds.