The Dirt on Pruning
Volunteers have been pruning and caring for Hidden Beach for decades. In recent years we’ve been lucky to have Daniel Collins as a paid consultant and dedicated volunteer. Daniel is a seasoned public trails professional specializing in restoration and has donated much of his time to coach us, and has shown up to work parties to maintain and prune our street end. We could not ask for a better friend in our efforts to maintain and improve Hidden Beach.
In 2023 a more stringent Seattle Tree Protection Ordinance was passed which had a direct impact on prunes made at Hidden Beach back in December 2024. In short: you used to be able to prune larger limbs, but that has been limited with this recent update.
Below is a reprint of Daniel Collins’ letter to neighbors of Hidden Beach explaining what happened. We’ll let Daniel speak for himself — but want to add that we can’t thank him enough for all his help with Hidden Beach (both paid and unpaid). In these topsy turvy times, it’s comes as no surprise that people doing good work often get the short end of the branch, while it’s the encroach-and-litigate and pay-to-obfuscate strategies that are in actual need of pruning.
LETTER TO NEIGHBORS OF HIDDEN BEACH
Tree pruning at Hidden Beach last year; we over-pruned and are addressing the issues
Two years ago FOHB commissioned a study of the trees on the street-end. The purpose was to provide our Landscape Architect with information that would allow her to design the best plan for restoring the street-end. You can look at the study in its entirety if you’d like.
The tree vegetation was catalogued for the first time and provided to the Street Use Division of the Transportation Dept.(SDOT) that oversees the street-end. Trees were evaluated for their condition which included: stress, disease, broken branches such as that caused by weighted limbs cracking lengthwise, and also the presence of a dead Bitter cherry tree Prunus emarginata close to the shore, which were all noted at the time.
Since that time we discovered a small,“self-planted” shrub/tree that was actually a Portuguese Laurel with leaves containing toxic cyanide. It was growing beside the trail. Finally it was discovered that two evergreens of diameter 3 “ had bases which were “girdled”, damaged by animals or humans and likely to die; see the photo below. Subsequently we also learned that there would be no future funds expended on street-ends north of I-90. None of this work would have been done by the city any time soon.
The Pruning:
We regret that we did not give the neighborhood notice of the impending pruning.
Nevertheless the volunteer work that took place was completely informed by the problem areas identified above. The street-end has not been pruned professionally in decades, if ever. Limbs larger than 2” in diameter were removed on several trees.
We apologize to the neighborhood that we left such a mess by the driveway for a few weeks, but the bottom line is that no actual damage was done. On the contrary much was done that preserves the health of existing trees and vegetation and the safety of visitors:
Damaged or diseased tree limbs were cut out and removed from the street-end,
two small dying trees were cut and removed from the street-end,
a rather toxic laurel tree Prunus lusitanica was cut and removed from the street-end,
limbs from the dead Bitter Cherry were cut back and removed from the street-end.
The hard pruning of dead limbs on the Bitter Cherry was an effort to make that dead tree safer. It is not clear what, if any, regulations apply to the trimming of a dead tree. It continues to function as a habitat tree, offering perches and lookouts for birds without being a danger to street-end visitors below; see the photo below
The street-end trees are decades overdue for some attention and preventative measures. Although our volunteers make every effort to work within city regulations and guidance from SDOT’s street-use division, we did indeed make a mistake in this case by pruning some limbs larger than 2” without first obtaining a permit. A new, more stringent Seattle Tree Protection Ordinance was passed in 2023 that required reporting that we were unaware of. The City therefore issued fines which we have paid. We are furthermore in the process of providing mitigation to the branches and small trees removed.
