How can a professional ‘gardener’ leave such a stub on the little California black oak in Felton Covered Bridge Park. It is not as if it is high in the canopy of a large tree, and out of reach to an arborist. This one is right at eye level, exactly where someone getting out of a car parked in the adjacent parking space would run into it. The entire tree needs some major corrective pruning, which would include the removal of significant limbs and portions of the canopy, but that is only because of years of neglect, and is another story. Right now, we are focusing on the eye-level stub.

It is not easy to see in these pictures because the lower branches are so congested. The stub extends from the lower left to the upper right in the first picture. It is right in the center of the second…