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From the Bangor Daily News:
Our tour began with a ginkgo tree, its 3-inch-diameter trunk rising from its tiny planting hole for about 3 feet before the first branch. Within the next 2 feet, there were 12 branches spaced between 1 and 2 inches apart, some already crossing and rubbing over others, others making a narrow angle with the trunk, growing up rather than out.
Tree after tree, ginkgos and tree lilacs, looked the same: too many closely spaced scaffold branches, a result of pre-pruning trees in the nursery. In this industrywide practice, small un-branched trees are headed back to encourage a proliferation of lateral branches. The problems associated with nursery pruning occur as the crowded branches grow larger in diameter, exerting pressure on each other while becoming weak and susceptible to breakage when loaded with ice or snow.
I asked the students to think down the road a few years, to imagine each branch increasing in diameter, reminding them that the space between branches remains the same as the tree grows. Surely something would have to give!
Pre-pruning is done to sell trees. Most people, unaware of the future problems associated with such closely spaced branches, will select a young tree with crowded branches over one with fewer widely spaced branches. But while scaffold branches 2 inches apart may look nice in miniature, they are going to be overcrowded and poorly anchored after they become a foot thick.
Unless you’re planting a ginkgo from seed, you’re probably getting one from a nursery. Learn as much as you can before you get that tree.
There’s a fascinating thread over at