Power tools manipulated with no skill and uncontrollable urges to dominate nature are a dangerous combination. Its as though these foul, noisy, hacking tree-mutilating scum never saw a tree, and cannot even imagine what a tree should look like. They apparently cannot tolerate something that grows free under the sun, spreading its branches as it would, growing a leafy canopy as it wills and putting forth flowers in its season. Gentle pruning for shape to enhance a tree’s beauty is as foreign to them as Outer Uglistan. If I were an Ent, the perpetrators of this mutiliation would now be sitting on a pile of rubble sucking rocks after their heinous crime against treehood.
These cuts leave large wounds open to infection by fungi, bugs or whatever comes along, as if anything can be worse for the tree than falling victim to the jerk who disfigured it. Any new growth will be more likely to break off at the base, since the smooth, flowing lines of xylem and phloem that ran from the roots to the leaves have been severed.
At this point, it would have been kinder to remove the tree, and certainly been less of an uglification to their landscape. Yes, it would have been even better to consult a book on pruning at the least, or call in someone who could remove dead wood, correctly shape the tree so that it continued to provide shade while keeping it beautiful. But, when you’ve got a hot, vibrating chainsaw in your hands, apparently this puts you in slash and burn mode. Assuming that you even have another mode.
So, dear reader, please: if you’re considering doing some pruning, study the subject first or hire someone whose work you’ve personally inspected for beauty and skill before you put blade to wood and ruin thirty years of growth to replace it with a shrine to your lack of taste and insensitivity to living trees.
If you’re value oriented, a hack job like this pretty much eliminates the tree’s contribution to your resale value. It casts no shade. Its bare, sawn-0ff branches have no grace. It will produce no flowers this year, because the buds went with the rest of the vegetation about a week before bloom season.
Perhaps it will some day recover with dense, crowded branches competing with each other for light and air. But never again will it regain the grace and flowing lines it that were its birthright.