So all the leaves are in in the backyard, and the trees are closing last year’s gaps nicely - when I moved in a big thing with the poorly maintained yard was the trees had too many trunks - split in 8 already by shoulder height, some of them long poles sporting just a tuft of leaves

Now wood is just a scaffold for energy-generating leaves and reproductive structures; growing and maintaining it consumes resources. So each year I’d chop a few, leaving gaps, and then branches from adjacent trunks would grow to “claim” the patch of canopy all that wood had been serving. (Also, the fact you could see it at all meant it was catching sunlight that could’ve gone through and fed a leaf somewhere.)

Someone asked if I had a guide of tips for tree-trimming, which I can get kinda superior about sometimes, I realize I’m less do-this-for-that-result than understanding the principles of how trees grow and what arises from that, I’ll try to put one together