Pruning is tricky mix of aesthetics, safety

A few decades ago, someone planted a spruce tree in a front yard on Connor Street in Salt Lake County. It's easy to imagine how small and cute the tree was then.

Eventually, however, even though spruces are slow growers, the tree reached a majestic height — several feet from a power line that runs east through neighboring yards. So last week tree trimmers contracted by Rocky Mountain Power took chain saws to the spruce, cutting out a large chunk of branches along the trunk.

One morning not long after that, Rich Buelte, the power company's senior area forester, stood across the street talking with Suze Harrington.

"It's a billboard for an ugly tree," Buelte conceded, looking up at the lopsided spruce. Then he explained why the cut was necessary. Harrington, who lives across the street from the spruce, wasn't convinced.

It's a perennial battle: trees vs. power lines, safety vs. aesthetics, the power company vs. customers who think its pruning methods are ruining the city. Occasionally there are letters to the editor (a recent one, from Ethel Hale, referred to "tree-slaying terrorists"). Buelte has been yelled at and once even had a gun pulled on him. And there are phone calls to Tree Utah.

Tree Utah is actually a nonprofit dedicated to tree-planting. The name, though, is similar to Trees Inc., the company that handles Rocky Mountain Power's utility pruning in most of Utah. And since Trees Inc. isn't listed in the phone book, people telephone Tree Utah by mistake. "We get a lot of irate phone calls," says Tree Utah executive director Jeff Ward.

January is a particularly good time to see what the furor is all about. Drive down 1300 East between East High and Westminster College, for example, and you'll see a long line of trees whose middles have been chopped out.

"Shapes that Mother Nature never intended," is the way Rose Park resident Paul Liston described his front-yard trees after they were pruned by Trees Inc. last summer.

"I appreciate the need to keep trees away from power lines, but couldn't some attention be paid to the natural beauty and shape of trees?" Liston wrote in a letter to the editor in June. "As it is, I can't even bear to look at them."

Utah State University Extension forester Mike Kuhns, a professor in the school's Department of Wildland Resources, has studied the public perception of utility pruning. In random surveys of residents in six Western cities, Kuhns discovered that most people prefer the way trees look when they've been "topped" — that is, when branches are trimmed so that the tree still maintains its rounded shape.