Lawn mowers and trees; often not a happy interaction

As the lawn mowing season commences, TPP must remind you that trees, particularly young ones, do not like lawn mowers, not the misused machine but the idiot guiding it.  A walk through any particular neighborhood will provide numerous examples of tree abuse at the hands of lawn mowers usually in the form of gouges and missing hunks of bark near the base of the trunk.  It's the most common sort of urban tree damage.  This is simply not good, and here's the thing, such injury is forever and can have long reaching consequences that will reduce the longevity of the tree. The injury shown is not new; it's a few years old.  You can see some evidence of the wood and bark growth closing over the wound, but it does not ever completely heal. The tree compartmentalizes the wound; the cambium may over grow the wound encasing the wound in wood. Evidence of the abuse. But that's not all; where the cambium fuses together from the two sides, it forms abnormal wood for years afterward, a radial seam of weakness that many years later under stress,  particularly during the winter, can split forming what is called a "frost crack".  It's really a tree-injury crack and this has been thoroughly demonstrated by dissecting cracked trees and sure enough there is always, always, anatomical evidence of prior injury. This particular injury is also promoting some unsightly basal sprouting, which sometimes encourages lawn mowing dummies to mow even closer to trim the sprouts. The solution is to mulch a perimeter around the tree to keep the lawn mower away.  
If you want either a book or a pamphlet about tree care, you should go here.  It's a web site about the life's work and publications of Alex Shigo, a noted forest pathologist and a mentor to many of us. In particular many of these publications especially the economically priced pamphlets very useful, informative, and not technical.  These are PP approved, and if you've been reader for any time at all, you will know that this blog gives very few endorsements and is bereft of ads and popups that plague and diminish many blogs with tawdry advertising.

Perils of lawn mowing

Our lawns need mowing in spite of the dry conditions interspersed with a couple of deluges. It's been nearly 3 weeks since they were last mowed, but the last thing a lawn needs in lolly-coddling. Crab grass is growing exceptionally well this year, and mowing will help prevent the production of a major crop of seeds. Mowing our lawn requires a lot of dodging and weaving in and around all the trees, bushes, and garden beds, and it's really icky out there right now because the garden spiders, many of whom are nearing the size of Shelob, have webs spanning up to 8 feet across walk ways. The problem is that your attention when mowing is directed downward so you walk into the webs head high. Now TPP doesn't have a major problem with spider, but the webs are icky nonetheless. The dry conditions have caused a lot of leaves to fall prematurely, and it is harvest season here abouts, and the lawn mower just kicks up clouds of dust and spores, something that sets off TPP's mucus production and irritates the sinuses. So adding to the tedium of lawn mowing is the misery of allergies and the ickiness of spider webs such that the enjoyment of the activity is largely lost. At least the lawn season is coming to an end.

Deforestation and clear cutting

TPP is basically opposed to deforestation and clear cutting.  It's basically a rape nature with a bulldozer mentality. However at times drastic action is needed, and in this case it was lawn that needed mowing, and it involved clear cutting and deforestation. The massive sugar maple had a good crop last year and this year the number of maple seedlings sprouting virtually everywhere is astounding. So simply mowing the lawn amounted to clear cutting of a very young forest. Wish the forest trying to take over our gardens could be removed as easily. To continue the theme, TPP had to patrol the western front of our estate to destroy an illegal immigrant: garlic mustard, which is kindly grown by a neighbor especially for export purposes. Fortunately garlic mustard does pull fairly easily. A visit to these distant regions did reveal that a fringe tree somewhat surrounded by ever embiggering conifers was in glorious full bloom, a delight to both eye and nose.