arboricide

• arborcide

From Latin arbor +‎ -icide.

arboricide (countable and uncountable, plural arboricides)

1. Any herbicide intended to kill trees or shrubs.
   • 2005, Vernon Reynolds, The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest: Ecology, Behaviour, and Conservation, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 16:

     Over a large area, trees of no commercial value such as figs, especially the so-called ‘strangling’ (epiphytic) varieties, together with Cynometra, Celtis spp. and Lasiodiscus were treated with a potent arboricide containing 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D dissolved in diesel oil.

2. (uncommon) The killing of a tree.
   • 1882, “Meeting for Discussion. Ornamental Arboriculture.”, in Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, for the Year 1882, part I, Boston, Mass.: the Society, page 16:

     President Hayes spoke of the gigantic trees which he had seen in California, one of which was so large that he and seven other persons rode into the hollow of its trunk. He had heard of the crime of arboricide, and agreed with Mr. Muzzey that it deserves punishment.

   • 1890 June, Mary E. Stickney, “Circumstantial Evidence. A Novel.”, in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott Company, chapter VI, page 798:

     Irresolutely she threaded her way among the motley crowd on the hot, unshaded platform of the station, pausing, because it seemed to bar her way, before the section of Pueblo’s king of cottonwoods, which advertising ingenuity has erected there,—fit monument, Donald had once said, for a city’s crime of arboricide.

   • 1899, The Conservative, page 1:

     The salaried tree killer for the state of Nebraska has been at work about the Soldiers’ Home at Milford. He is guilty of arboricide in the first degree.

   • 1899, Henry Grey Graham, “The Land and the People, 1700-1750”, in The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, volume I, London: Adam and Charles Black, page 199:

     Under cover of the night they pulled up the saplings, tore down the branches, and maimed the trunks, and often in the morning the dismayed laird saw that in the darkness the labours and pride of years had been ruthlessly ruined. […] The barons of regality might issue their threats, the statutes of the State might renew and increase their penalties; but this crime of arboricide was distressingly frequent, to the discouragement of “improvers.”

   • 1994, James C. Humes, The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill: A Treasury of More than 1,000 Quotations and Anecdotes, HarperPerennial, published 1995, →ISBN, page 140:

     When his [Winston Churchill’s] wife [Clementine] had chopped down a favorite elm tree at Chartwell, Churchill said to her, “Clemmie, you are guilty of arboricide!”

   • 2008, Kenny G, “May We Graft Chicken Wings to Your Head In The Interest of Aviation?: The insane (but hilarious) minds of Coyle & Sharpe”, in Dave the Spazz , editor, The Best of LCD: The Art and Writing of WFMU, Princeton Architectural Press, →ISBN, page 90:

     As the leaves begin to fall from the tree, they accuse the man of being anti-arboreal and an enemy of nature, a claim that he adamantly denies. More arguing ensues and in his characteristically brilliant manner, James Coyle forces the conversation to the point where the man has been accused, tried, and found guilty of arboricide.

   • 2013, Matthew Goodman, Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World, New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks, published 2014, →ISBN, page 357:

     The design of the house had been adapted to the surrounding trees, “wound and looped between these irreplaceable treasures,” Bisland wrote in an article about Applegarth, “pushing out a porch here, or a window there . . . and stepping up and down to rooms of different levels as the grade of the land required, so that roots need not be cut nor branches lopped”; they had not wanted to commit, as she put it, “the too common crime of arboricide.”

• arboricidal