I recently had the misfortune of visiting the little town of Etna, PA in the aftermath of the town’s yearly tree massacre. I assume the tree massacre isn’t something the town officials have entered into the community activities roster, but, whether announced or not, it happens every spring in Etna.

Etna is a borough of about 3900 folks located on the North bank of the Allegheny River, just ten minutes from downtown Pittsburgh. Like many area river towns, Etna has seen better times, and has some depressing vistas. Still, many good people are products of the dozens of similar little villages in Western Pennsylvania, and to make fun of Etna’s bad spots would be as uncool as belittling your own infirm grandma. Etna’s fundamental problems are complex societal problems, and the solutions are difficult for a small town to tackle. What is within their power to manage and what they did a ghastly job of managing is their street trees.

For unknown reasons, who ever controls the town’s tree maintenance has some very odd ideas about community beautification. The trees have been butchered (I can’t bear to use the word pruned for this hack job) down to their trunks, many with flat tops left to invite disease. The pictures tell the story of how dozens of trees lining the town’s business district were destructively cut into grotesque stubs.

I could go on and on about proper pruning and maintenance techniques, but shouldn’t the people in charge of the Etna trees already know this stuff? Topping is a detrimental practice, ultimately causing malformed regrowth, disease and the death of the tree, but this butchery goes beyond topping.

I can hear the excuses already: the trees are too big for the street if allowed to grow. That’s evidence of the first mistake on the part of Etna’s officials. Certain trees are indeed too large to plant as street trees, but others have been bred to produce slender, upright growth patterns that are great for street use. Many fastigiate varieties have a teardrop silhouette and don’t interfere with pedestrians or parked cars. Even if the town is saddled with types that aren’t quite the right size, wouldn’t some judicious limbing up make more sense?

In an old European practice called pollarding, all the limbs were cut off young trees to encourage rapid growth of thin, lateral limbs for firewood. The cutting has to be repeated every year, and eventually results in a stubby, gnarled look, with an oddly swollen top to the trunk, which usually becomes hollow. Only certain species can be pollarded successfully. Here’s a Wikipedia article which explains the technique. Assuming the Etna public works people weren’t out to harvest firewood in the business district, I doubt if the massacre was done with pollarding in mind.

I guess I could be called a tree hugger; I hate to see trees needlessly destroyed, but the issue goes beyond that. A town like Etna needs to do the best it can with limited resources. It can’t pretend to be its swanky neighbor, Fox Chapel. There’s no Starbucks in Etna, and that’s okay. Many people are quite content to drink their Sanka or Maxwell House, as they’ve done for generations, in one of the respectable blue collar homes clinging to the incredibly steep streets of Etna. Every community doesn’t need to be pretentious, cutesy and oh-so-hip.

Every community can, however, try to be inviting and decent; it can endeavor to be a comfortable place to live. Etna’s business district now radiates the feeling that something bad happened here. To use politically incorrect terms, it looks crippled and deformed. It has the aura of the kind of place where an asbestos factory might be around the corner.

If you want a small dog, you don’t buy a German shepherd and cut off its legs; you buy a dauschund. If you want small street trees, you plant small street trees and maintain them properly, so the street looks like a sane, safe community where people might want to shop, buy homes and pay taxes.

If the Etna officials should happen to read this post, I would be glad to hear their feedback.