The results of abuse can be devastating. Hoyt points to a tree with a huge gash in it. Half of it fell off during Hurricane Irene. "This is probably 800 pounds that came down across the road."
Then, with Perry Mason flair, Hoyt draws a further conclusion: "The storm did not break this tree up. A preexisting condition did. This," he says, pointing to a striated swirl of bark as exhibit A, "is the trigger. The wind only pulled the trigger."
Arborist C. Way Hoyt measures a ficus. The homeowner chopped down the tree without Hoyt's help or the required permit.
Larry Singer
Arborist C. Way Hoyt measures a ficus. The homeowner chopped down the tree without Hoyt's help or the required permit.
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Now the massive tree is being held up by the five inches of trunk that remain. "What people don't understand is that what you plant as a nursery tree with a two-inch trunk may become a giant structure with a ten-foot trunk. It could fall over and kill you," Hoyt says, backing away. "This is what I call a tear-on-the-dotted-line tree. This is a ticking time bomb."
Hoyt is not being melodramatic. As the area's leading arborist, he's often called upon to testify in personal-injury lawsuits involving trees. In one 1986 Broward case, Hoyt told a jury improper pruning weakened a tree limb that later broke while a 14-year-old boy was climbing it. The accident left the boy a quadriplegic. Although the jury found the property owner to be 50 percent at fault, the insurance company paid the policy limit for liability after the verdict.
In a 1994 Boca Raton case, a schoolteacher was seriously injured when a large tree trunk fell on his car as he was driving down the street. Hoyt testified the company that pruned the tree should have recognized the preexisting condition (codominant trunk with bark inclusion) that contributed to the accident.Hoyt trains an impassive gaze across the Intracoastal to the ocean, past rooftops of Spanish tile, across landscapes gleaming with patches of aquamarine, and finally to a hole in the roof of a charred wooden house below -- an accident, probably. We are in a bucket 74 feet above his truck, so when he leans against the side, his wiry frame rests near a sign that reads, "Falling from platform could result in death or serious injury." The black-and-white stick figure tumbling in midair is at once comical and unnerving.
He doesn't speak. Few noises carry up here, and in the near silence there's room for contemplation. It's the middle of a workday in the middle of the workweek, but among the treetops, what does that matter, really?
"Trees don't punch the same time clock," Hoyt likes to say. "People don't think long-term, like a tree does."
If it's possible to think like a tree, Hoyt does. He points to a tiny scar. "If I get a cut on my arm, as I did many years ago, I get stitches, I heal. Trees don't heal, never have, never will. Healing is the restoration to previous function. Tree tissue doesn't heal." With that he flips a switch that sends us rumbling back to earth.
"It's really discipline," Hoyt says, his feet now on solid ground. Subordination is the remedy for Siamese-twin tree syndrome, he explains. One of the two sides is shortened to relieve stress on the branches, and foliage is removed to slow the growth of the stem's diameter. "It's sort of like putting braces on a child's teeth."
Although the concept is referenced in earlier writings on arboriculture, Hoyt says he coined the evocative term eight years ago, while standing on his back porch with his friend Professor Ed Gilman. It seemed to fit, and Gilman liked it so much he used it in his writing.
Gilman is a professor of environmental horticulture at the University of Florida. Hoyt is the area's top arborist and consultant, as well as a community college instructor. Although there's no power struggle between them, Hoyt and Gilman are, in a way, codominant leaders.
The two men and their wives take vacations together each year. "Our wives have laid down the law," Hoyt says. "We're allowed two hours a day or two days of the week to talk about trees."
And after the buzzer sounds? "Then we have very quiet times. We don't know how to talk about anything but trees."Jack Martin has come full circle. His subdivision patrol now complete, we return to the place where a week ago he found a rash of hat-racking -- the apparent result of an overzealous homeowners association. Although Martin wrote a dozen citations, Edward Scissorhands returned, tearing trees limb from limb until they lined the streets like soldiers, defeated and retreating.
He grips the clipboard and flashes the maybe-I'm-joking-maybe-I'm-not grin one imagines came in handy during his two tours in Vietnam. Suddenly Martin looks solemn. "The funny thing about it," he says without a trace of humor, "is these are good friends of mine. I'm gonna have to write them up."
Back in his doublewide cubicle in the Coconut Creek Government Center, things get funnier still. Martin leans forward to confide a truth that might be found in the dark heart of us all: "I used to hat-rack, too," he whispers. "But don't you go printing that!"
