ROTFLMBO .... engineers.. are so ... so ... conceptual ... ask them to explain anything.. and odds are.. they can ... though most of it will be un-understandable to most of us ... but OMG ... most of them need to be kept away from tools ... i had one engineer buddy.. who could do NOTHING ... without making himself bleed ... it was a running joke between the rest of us.. taking odds when it would happen in any given project ...... my wife to be and the gang went up north for a long weekend.. and we were chopping wood or whatever.. for the cottage owner.. and dave starts bleeding.. and the rest of us ignore him.. and go have another beer ... and wifey is having a stroke because he cut himself .. and our reaction was.. oh.. thats just daves way ... lol ... that was near 15 years ago.. and she was just telling the story .. again .... last week ... lol listen closely ... on trees ... the biggest mistake i made for decades.. was thinking the branch had to be taken down intact ... say a 15 footer ... then one day.. i had a 'duh' moment ... and started cutting off 5 foot sections ... basically what i could hold in my hand after severing ... without falling off the ladder ... all the brush is going to have to be sectioned out for disposal.. so why not do it while it is hanging in the tree ... as i said.. DUH!!!! good luck ken

The ones that are a safety issue should be cut but leave as much stump as possible as habitat for other critters. The others should be left alone. If you don't have a pressing need to use the cut wood, leave it lying on the ground where it falls. When the tree grew the wood it took nutrients out of the soil to do so. When the tree dies is when the nutrients are returned to the soil for other critters to use. Ditto for any leaf and twig fall. Harvesting interupts the nutrient cycle - that's why gardens and crops need to be fertilized and wild lands don't. Wood decaying organisms, like bugs and fungi, decompose the wood biomass into nutrients for plants like ferns and new trees to use, as well as being food for woodpeckers and such.

Answering the question of what to put in place of the trees, I'd recommend sod in order to heal the scarred lawn. The area is too close to the drive and street for shrub obstructions and there are already street trees nearby. If you are trying to hide some of the property across the street, then place a dome shaped shrub about 15'-20' from the street and 10'-12' from the drive. (Placing it too close to street or drive will be a disadvantage in one way or another.) The acceptable shapes to prune it to are dome or tapered cylinder. (If you prune to a ball, you'll ultimately be creating a mushroom shape tree form where the stem would be short stilts.) It could have a square footprint if you prefer. I'm not saying that placing a shrub there is ideal regardless of other circumstances. It's ideal if it solves your problem. If you don't need it, stick with sod only. I would be limbing up the street trees a little for cleaner appearance and so it's not a bigger job later. Examples of dome shaped shrubs, circled in red, especially at the background. It could be evergreen but doesn't seem that it must be, which would open up the the options in shrub selection.

So we are 9 days before closing. My husband and I did a drive by the house this week. We wanted to see if there was any kind of antennas on top of the roof. While driving by we noticed the two 40 plus year old apple trees have been cut down in the last week. My husband grew up in this house from 1989 to 2009 that's how we know there 40 plus years old. So we get ahold of our realtor that morning absolutely livid. He contacts the seller realtor twice that day both times the sellers realtor came back and said my sellers did not cut them down. A few hours goes by I go to do drive by the house again just by chance to see if anybody's out there finishing cutting them. Low and behold there's a man out there with a truck and trailer cutting the rest of the wood up and hauling the wood away. Mind you at this point the seller has told my realtor twice that it was not them that had them cut down. So here I am thinking that this is just some stranger illegally cutting these gorgeous apple trees on a property that I take ownership of in 9 days. I confronted the man he said the caretaker of the land was given permission to give him permission to cut them down by the owners. After that I get back in my vehicle and my realtor calls me stating that the owners just sent them a message finally admitting that they had the trees cut down because they were infested with ants and disease and thought that us the buyers would have an issue with them. There's a 50 foot plus completely dead tree that wasn't even touched or talked about. We live in a very small community last night I'm driving back to my house and I see the same truck with the wood on a trailer at a gouse in town with two huge smokers next to my cut down trees. Can the sellers do this what is the repercussions I don't even know where to begin or who I should contact. Please help any advice would be great!!