I came on looking for advice to prune our Monkey Puzzle tree because the branches are out of control. This photo was taken 4 years ago and the branches are a lot lower now. I was hoping to find someone that has mushroomed their tree or made it into an umbrella shape with the majority of the lower and middle branches being pruned. My 12 year old is allergic to the pollen from the tree. We struggle with her allergies for several months in spring and early summer. I'm not really seeing anyone else with as big as a problem as mine. The tree is beautiful but its a death trap to walk under and it makes my daughter sick. Anyone have any ideas? Have you ever seen anyone prune these back to where the lower and middle branches are cut?
Pruning won't help your pollen problem, only complete removal will do that. These trees are not suited to regular pruning as you can tell from previous comments on this thread. Over about a century it will take on the form you want on its own - lower branches drop off. Sadly it is just the wrong tree for you.
My goodness Valley_girl, what an amazing looking tree. We have a Monkey Puzzle tree too, but it is nowhere near as dense as this lovely specimen. However I can understand your concern for your 12 year old as I too have severe allergies although not to our tree as far as I am aware. I am sorry that I can't help you with suggestions for cutting the tree back - I have never heard of this being done and in our case our tree isn't dense enough to warrant cutting as you can see below. Perhaps it is a different variety. I hope someone on here can help you although the obvious answer is as steephill suggests - to get rid of the tree completely.
Does anyone know how to collect seeds/fruit from a VERY high monkey puzzle tree? Would love to be able to share them out to people but the tree is too high to be able to collect them. All I end up with is the dried out seeds that fall on the grass. TIA
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Removing them from the tree would be pointless, because they wouldn't be ready.
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...