Tree topping involves indiscriminately cutting back a tree’s canopy with little to no regard for natural structure or proper pruning techniques.

Dan Rawls knows trees. Having spent more than three decades making a living out of harvesting and maintaining them, he brings that experience to the company he founded in 2013, Precision Tree Service.

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 ...