Fall has always seemed an especially sweet season for me. When I was a kid I’d get a thrill seeing the neatly lined up boxes of fresh pencils and rows of unmarked notebooks in the stores. Not to ...

Like all good things, trees need to be nurtured and maintained. And for many Southern Californians, a not uncommon sight of maintenance we've seen takes the dramatic form of trees having their ...

In my last column I mentioned a “topped” street tree. I’d like to use this column to write more explicitly about the misguided practice of tree-“topping”, why it is so bad, and what the proper ...

An unsatisfactory approach to tree maintenance or pruning is “topping” it. Topping is the indiscriminant removal of branches of a tree above an arbitrary height, leaving unnatural, grotesque stubs and ...