The homeowner who showed me my own pruning mistake with one branch

Last month in Dayton, I was doing a routine oak trim and this older guy comes out holding a single cut branch from his backyard tree. He said, "you cut this one last spring and it's already splitting at the union." I walked over with him and sure enough, the cut was too flush against the trunk, exactly the kind of thing I'd been criticizing on other people's work for years. He didn't get mad, just asked why I did it that way. I honestly had no good answer, I was rushing to fit in one more job that day. It took a stranger pointing at one limb to make me slow down and recheck my own cuts on every tree since then. Has anyone else caught themselves making the same mistake they call out in others, and how did you fix the habit?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_rowan4d ago

Oh man, @the_daniel, that question cuts deep. It was both, honestly. The sting of being caught was real, but the bigger knot in my stomach was knowing I had the training and the eye for it, and I still let the clock win that day. That branch was a straight-up mirror, and I didn't like my reflection. I've started doing a slow walk around every tree before I even fire up the saw, just to force myself to see my own work the way a stranger would.

the_daniel4d ago

Honestly, what gets me is that you had already caught yourself doing it to other people's work. You had the eye for the problem, but you lost it when you were the one holding the saw. So my question is this: were you more upset about being called out, or about the fact that you knew better and did it anyway? Because those are two totally different fixes. One is about ego, the other is about your process. Which one do you think was really driving you that day?