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Here’s some marketing advice for merchants: People spend more money where there are trees, and will pay more money for the same item in an area with trees.

Yet one of the main reasons urban trees get hacked back is that their canopies block merchants’ signs.

So reports Ed Gilman, guru of the tree world at the University of Florida and one of the nation’s leading experts in landscaping with trees. Gilman came to Naples for a workshop on tree planting, maintenance and research Sept. 13, and offered solutions as well as a look at problems.

For business districts, Gilman recommends getting the signs down to the eye level of the pedestrian or driver, and letting the trees grow to shade the sidewalks. He also advocates bringing security lighting down to 10 to 12 feet above ground to enable the tree canopy to grow above it. That way the ground where the people and cars are is adequately lit, and tree canopies don’t get butchered.

Gilman didn’t mince words about bad tree maintenance. Asked about the common practice of canopy thinning, he replied that its only purpose was to “transfer money from one bank account to another.”

He calls planting trees so close to sidewalks or streets that their total removal is eventually necessary the “insanity solution” to urban design. After there was no audience response to his query, “Anybody want to talk about pruning?” Gilman continued, “Well, I’m going to talk about it anyway.”

With self-deprecating humor, he confessed, “I’ve made a career of proving the obvious.

“Sometimes I feel like a used car salesman, but I do have some data.”

In Gilman’s thorough Web site is an entire section on storms, which ties in with detailed information on the hows and whys of pruning . Gilman maintains that proper structural pruning will make a tree much more resistant to wind damage. To oversimplify, he advocates pruning trees to have one central main vertical trunk, with smaller limbs branching horizontally. It was sobering to drive home afterwards and see so many street trees in the area illustrating inadequate to downright bad pruning practices.

Gilman’s Web site (see side story) has numerous illustrations of good and bad pruning, with detailed graphics on fixing and preventing problems. The site will tell you how to select a quality tree from roots to crown, how to plant it, and how to keep it healthy. It covers palms and pines along with hardwoods, shrubs, and groundcovers. The section on nursery production, though geared to professional growers, provides a wealth of detail to the interested homeowner who wants to know everything about his trees.

Among Gilman’s tree truths:

n Don’t plant a field-grown nursery tree with the top of the root ball even with the ground. His research has shown that trees do better with the top of the root ball about two inches above the surrounding ground level.

n Containerized trees call for more complex evaluation. If a tree has been started as a cutting, there will be a considerable area of its stem underground before the point at which the roots originate. This point, not the actual soil level in the pot, should be at or slightly above ground level. The outward flare of roots should be visible, he explains. Trees should not stick out of the ground like telephone poles.

Tree roots want to be near the surface. Planting deeper will not encourage roots to grow deeper, but instead, will make root problems more likely. Any root problem eventually affects the tree’s canopy. gilman. A tree that looks pretty good, but has a thinning or brown area at the top, most likely has root problems that are keeping water and nutrients from reaching the highest branches.

n Be careful with the mulch. We are told to mulch, mulch, mulch, but Gilman stresses not to mulch or backfill soil over tree roots. Doing so can promote the growth of surface roots that can strangle the trunk. Mulching against the trunk can prevent water and nutrients from reaching the roots, and also lead to decay of the trunk. While we might tend to think that a little fertilizer can’t hurt an ailing tree, Gilman cautions that it can indeed, especially a mulch high in nitrogen. Abundant nitrogen applied to a drought-stressed tree, even after the rains have resumed, or to a mature hardwood, may encourage root rot.