What Lopping Should Actually Mean On Your Tree

The word people search and the thing they want

Nearly every enquiry that comes in says lopping. Crews answer to it, and there is no point pretending otherwise. But the technical meaning of lopping is cutting limbs back to stubs at convenient points, with no regard for where the tree can actually grow from, and that is the one thing you should not let anyone do to a tree you intend to keep.

Here is why it fails. A branch cut back to a lateral big enough to take over becomes the new leader and the wound closes over. A branch sawn off mid-span leaves a stub with no leaves on it. The stub dies back, water gets into the exposed end grain, and decay moves down into the parent limb. Meanwhile the tree panics and throws dense epicormic shoots out of dormant buds just behind the cut. Those shoots are anchored only in the outer few millimetres of a limb that is now rotting from the cut face inwards. Five years later they are three metres long, heavy, and sitting on a rotten base directly above whatever you were trying to protect.

What gets done instead

• Crown reduction. The overall size of the crown is brought in by cutting back to suitable laterals, keeping the tree's natural shape. This is what most people mean when they ask for lopping.
• Crown thinning. Selected branches are removed throughout the crown so wind passes through instead of pushing on it, without changing the outline. The classic Fremantle job.
• Deadwooding. Dead and hanging limbs are taken out. Nothing living is cut. This is the highest-value pruning there is for reducing what falls on your car.
• Crown lifting. The lowest limbs come off to clear a roof, a driveway, a fence line or a footpath.
• Formative pruning. Early corrective cuts on a young tree so it never develops the co-dominant stem that has to be dealt with expensively in twenty years.

Pruning of amenity trees in Australia has a published standard, AS 4373, which sets out where a cut is made and what each of those operations means. It is worth asking whoever quotes you which of those five things they are proposing, in those words. A straight answer is a good sign.

Wind-sail reduction and the Fremantle Doctor

More pruning around here is about wind than about shade. The afternoon sea breeze off the Indian Ocean runs hard through summer, and a dense crown behaves like a sail on a long lever. Thinning that crown so air moves through it lowers the load on the branch unions and on the root plate without shrinking the tree.

That matters more in Fremantle than in most of Perth because of the ground. Shallow sand over Tamala limestone means root plates spread wide across the rock rather than anchoring deep. Saturate that sand with winter rain, then put a frontal wind through a heavy crown, and the tree does not snap — it levers out. Lemon-scented gums, marri and big peppermints all show up on that list locally. Norfolk Island pines along the coast take wind well but shed heavy limbs when they carry too much end weight.

When reduction is the wrong answer

The honest version of this page has to include the times cutting back will not save the tree, because an operator paid by the cut has every reason not to mention them.

Reduction does not fix a tree with significant decay at the base or in a main union — taking weight off buys a little time, but the failure point is still there. It does not fix a root plate that has already lifted, which you read as cracked or heaved soil on the windward side rather than in the crown at all. It does not fix a crown that is more than about half dead. And it does nothing for a tree that was planted too close to a limestone wall or a boundary, because the problem is the position, not the size.

In those cases the honest answer is removal, and saying so early is cheaper than two rounds of pruning followed by removal anyway. Where the call is genuinely arguable, or where a neighbour, an insurer or a council is involved, get a written arborist assessment before anyone starts the saw.

Palms are cleaned, not pruned

Worth separating, because a lot of lopping enquiries here are actually palm enquiries. A palm has one growing point at the top of the trunk and no ability to regrow from a cut stem. Dead fronds, flower spikes and seed heads come off; the living crown stays. Cutting a palm crown back hard, sometimes sold as hurricane cutting, permanently weakens it. That work has its own page.

Before you book

Both the City of Fremantle and the Town of East Fremantle regulate significant trees, and in some cases that extends to how heavily a listed tree may be pruned, not just to whether it can be removed. Verge trees belong to the council. The permits and approvals guide covers Fremantle, East Fremantle, Melville and Cockburn. If a limb has already come down, storm and emergency work is a separate call, any hour. For what moves a price, see the cost guide. Pruning is quoted across Fremantle, East Fremantle, Bicton, Palmyra, Attadale, Mosman Park and the rest of the suburbs covered.