@M. Frary I have noticed the collar cuts (now I know what they are) before and thought how great some of them would look carved out to make a nice uro. I have had an eye on half dozen cuts on large trees around the city to watch how they heal over the coming years.
Deciduous trees should be pruned in fall after leaf fall. The tree will not begin healing till spring. This will give the wound time to compartmentalize and heal as a smaller unit. If major cut are made during the heavy growing time, the callus will be thick and unsightly.
Conifers and pines should be treated as Dave suggested and made part of the total image by leaving jin stubs and treating them later with lime sulpher or removal flush with trunk after drying.
@Smoke I have slowly been coming to that conclusion on my own. I have read numerous times to cut in the spring for a fast heal of cuts, and have found that it only is applicable to smaller (pencil sized and under) branches and even then some take a few years to smooth the bump over. By making the cut in the fall, does it slow down the healing the next growing season? In my limited and very unscientific data pool, it seems like it takes at least twice as long. I am not bothered if it does, I am curious to know if it something I am doing or not doing to inhibit the growth of the callous or if that is just how it works and and maybe slower growth is best long for the long term growth of the tree.
When something grows as slowly as a tree, you really need be to into them for a long time to be able to learn their growing patterns, habits, and reactions. Doing a trunk chop on a maple and watching it heal for five years only to learn that this has gone wrong or that happened makes for slow learning. Particularly if you don't have enough trees to be trying a bigger technique at least once a year if not more. It only took me six years to learn to buy enough trees that I can try a lot of this on them fairly often, well, once they all recover from being repotted this spring.
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