Oh wow.

They have obviously been doing that to those trees for quite some time, so I would say they do have a long-term plan - prune them like that each year. But, yes, that's nasty.

I try to imaging what they will look like when the trunk is two or three feet across.

My neighbor planted an oak too close to her pool cage and lollipopped it every year. It just depressed me. I know crepe murder is not good, but I do love the fountaining effect it creates.

Crimes Against Horticulture; When Bad Taste Meets Power Tools

hoovb, I like seeing your pictures. In #3, what kind of trees are they?

I live in a very rural area. When we first moved here I came home from work and saw that the power company had been by to trim around the power lines. They had completely lopped the top half of one of the pines and ours wasn't the only one. They had also done the same thing with the other trees as some of the photos above. I emailed them and explained that although we understand why they have to do it, we would have rather they just take out the entire tree and be done with it rather than butcher and disfigure it like that. So they called me and informed me that if that is what we would prefer they would gladly do that the next time around, the only thing is we would have to haul the tree away, they wouldn't do that. So we gave them the go-ahead because the butcher job was just too awful to live with.

Yes, there should be a division of plant police to see that the tragedy doesn't continue.

I know it is horrible, but I have noticed some absolutely horrible trim jobs on some Bradford pears. They are cutting all of the branches back to 3 or 5 feet from the trunk. They seem to survive and come back stronger than they were ln their un butchered state.

Why the hell would you turn a live oak into a Pom Pom?

Wow! I never knew people did this to Live Oaks too. Poor babies! I have several monster sized Live Oaks, probaly 100 yr old or more on our property, dripping in Spanish Moss. Its hard to imagine they could ever be pom poms lol.

The power company cut one side off of the Chinquapin oak next to my apartment to get it away from the power lines. Meanwhile, when the complex was replacing oaks that came down during Irma, they made them plant one right under a power line. WTH were they thinking? There were at last 3 other places they could have planted that tree where it wouldn't have interfered with anything. I always want to dig it up and move it.

Truffula trees?

hoovb, I like seeing your pictures. In #3, what kind of trees are they?

Ficus benjamina.

I guess A tree is better than no tree. They may look abominable hacked back so mindlessly but they still absorb carbon and produce oxygen. The biggest problem I see is that nearly all of these trees are much more likely to topple over now due to either the weight of the canopies being so uneven, the canopy being so dense that wind can't pass through it and just the point of gravity being so high up on all of them.

The Plant Amnesty membership organization was founded in my area some time ago because of one person's reaction to all of the bad pruning that was going on.

https://www.plantamnesty.org/

Damn power line ppl lopped off the top of shat was believed to be a wild black cherry tree that did not have any branches near the lines and the tree was already as tall or close to being as tall as the lines. Why could they not keep an eye on it and if a branch finally grew near the lop the branch.

All i can think now is it will start branching in all sorts of ways, it might actually grow a branch out then up to meet a line in the future.