About 17 years ago I planted a smoke tree in front of a friend's house. It had total southern exposure and grew beautifully to a height of maybe 15 feet and flowered nicely. In the early years a neighbor of my friend pruned it to make it a true tree with one trunk and has always pruned the suckers. Perhaps two years ago the tree started to noticeably die from the top and by this summer more than half of it was dead from the top down although it had suckers that were growing very well. Since that part of the tree was dead I decided to cut it off and simply allow the suckers to grow and that actually worked well. The suckers grew to a height of 10 feet and you could not even see the cut trunk. It did not flower, but it looked to be a colorful foliage bush. A week ago my friend was out of town for more than a week and the pruning neighbor came by to clean up the weed growth in front of the house. The smoke tree has a good sized trunk which you really could not see with the growth of the suckers all around it and it looked nice. This neighbor proceeded to prune off all of the branches, leaving about a 5 1/2 foot pole of the trunk. Why he did this, I don't know and neither does my friend. My question is does this tree have a chance to survive this pruning? My thought when I topped it was that it was dying anyways but that maybe I could salvage a couple of seasons of at least a decent looking shrub from it and it did seem to be working that way, but I am not sure if it can survive the total pruning of all its branches. TIA
