Local green thumb bemoans metro’s pruning practices
Though few give much thought to pruning palm trees, a Geduld resident finds the way in which the Ekurhuleni Metro prunes these trees, aggravating.
Gerhard Dry believes the palm trees in Olympia Park have been pruned improperly.
Dry says the trees, Phoenix canariensis, have been unnecessarily hacked, leaving only a few leaves to protect them.
“What an ugly sight it is,” he says.
According to Dry, palm trees cannot heal wounds made to the tree and badly pruned trees can easily die.
Dry says palm trees should not be ‘topped’ at all.
A horticulturist for nearly 40 years, Dry has enough knowledge about trees and plants.
He recalls pruning palm trees only when they were near power lines and finds the pruning of these trees unnecessary.
He says topping a palm tree to such an extent that the green leaves are cut off, can’t be beneficial to the tree as it will take four to five years to recover.
The dead leaves hanging from the top of the tree are used by birds as a safe place to breed and raise chicks.
“The landscapers should have worked more selectively and not just their own initiative to prune,” he says.
He has been watching the growth of these beautiful palm trees for many years.
However, it is now an eyesore and Dry wants answers from the metro.
‘I want to know the reason behind the pruning of these trees and I believe they were pruned by ignorant metro landscapers,” he says.
Although the metro claims they have qualified arboriculturists who are trained to cut the trees. Dry has no idea what it has to do with pruning the trees to this extent and disturbing the bird life.
He claims an arboriculturist, who is managing the cultivation and study of trees, should not be pruning trees.
Themba Gadebe, metro spokesman, says the metro’s parks department trains these arboriculturists regularly.
“They pruned the trees accordingly in order to avoid the trees being bushy and attracting infections,” he says.
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