It is the season in which BGE trims trees around the Baltimore area. The devastation that is inflicted on the landscapes of homeowners is hard to comprehend. Although I and most others agree that BGE must do tree trimming in order to prevent power outages, the way in which its representatives do so often wrecks gardens and trees that people have spent years growing and enjoying.

BGE and its subcontractors seem to have little regard for how they do the work that they need to do. In my experience, they stomp on bushes and flowers, knock over stone walls and prune or cut down trees without any regard for best practices in tree management. Pruning cypress trees by lopping off the top half, as they did behind my house, looks ridiculous and destroys the tree. If they are going to do that, they should just remove the tree. But BGE would rather cut the tree in half and force the customer to pay a tree service themselves to take it the rest of the way down.

The approach of BGE is what I would call “clear cutting.” They have decided the clearances that they want and cut down or disfigure anything close to those clear-ances.

Recently I got a notice that tree work would be done in my neighborhood. I repeatedly called the number listed in order to discuss the work prior to the arrival of the crew. I got no response from repeated calls. Then, without further warning, BGE came to my yard. I met the workers while they were standing with their boots on top of my bushes and flowers. Smashed plants lay all around. They had already cut off tree limbs that were far below the wires and would never be a threat to the power lines 30 feet above.

I asked the workers to leave, and they promised to have a supervisor meet with me before any more work was done. But without warning, a few days later, BGE came back, and this time with a vengeance. On this occasion, after I asked them to stop, the workers said they could do anything they wanted in my yard and that I could not stop them. They called the police to remove me. Finally, in order to get BGE to stop cutting down a tree far from the wires, I stood under the tree until a BGE supervisor finally showed up. He informed the workers that this tree did not, in fact, need to be cut down.

Neighbors and friends all complain about BGE cutting down dogwoods, crape myrtles and other trees that will never reach wires, and disfiguring mature trees unnecessarily. In my neighborhood, the wires are in the backyard, where mature trees are growing and homeowners love their gardens. This is ridiculous. These wires should be buried, as it is inevitable that trees and wires will come down. In order to be sure that no 50-foot or 100-foot tree will fall on a wire, almost every mature tree in the neighborhood would have to go. Are we going to cut down all the trees?

In urban areas in Europe, a far greater percentage of local power lines are underground, resulting in far fewer outages. With global climate change, and likely more severe weather coming, it is time for BGE to plan for the future and start burying lines, particularly in vulnerable neighborhoods. This would improve reliability as well as the appearance of our gardens and the value of our homes.

In the meantime, BGE must hire tree trimmers who are experienced and properly trained in working in residential neighborhoods and gardens and who know how to follow the appropriate standards for pruning. BGE needs to do a better job of notifying customers and working with them to avoid unnecessary destruction of our natural environment. They have proved to violate their own standards repeatedly, yet there is no way to hold them accountable.

Eric Johnson is a homeowner in Towson; his email is baltimoreeric@comcast.net.