Carving your the initials of you and your love into a tree; oh how romantic.

Romantic? Maybe if hardwood homicide melts your heart…

R.D and A.C celebrated their love for each other and hate for trees on this maple in Elmwood Park.

A tree doesn’t heal like you or I; unable to repair an injured area, the arbor simply grows around it. In a sense, these cuts are forever, much like the wounds caused by your first crush’s rejection in middle school.

Though bark tends to look more like a canvas than an important protective barrier, it acts much like our own skin keeping the bad stuff out and the good stuff in. The bark of a woody tree is comprised of inner bark and outer bark. Outer bark protects the inner bark and comes in a large variety of colors, textures, and thicknesses. When hooligan vandals “in love” massacre the outer bark with their monogram, that protective barrier is punctured and moisture and disease have easy access to wreak havoc on the heart of the tree.

What’s worse is when the lovestruck couple (whose relationship most likely won’t last as long as most saplings) cut deep enough to damage the inner bark. The inner bark is made up of the phloem, cambium, xylem, heartwood and pith. The phloem is the first layer inside the outer bark and is a common victim of tree carving. The phloem’s main purpose is food transportation from the leaves down the tree. When Richard Davis and Alison Cruz or Riley Downs and Abby Campbell or Ryan Davis and Annie Clark, or whoever the rascally couple is, decided to tattoo this tree with their love they severed the phloem, and much like a slit straw, made it much harder for the leaves to feed the rest of tree. And if you cut more than 75% of the phloem around the circumference of the tree, you official join the ranks of Paul Bunyan as a tree murderer. The fine specimen you marked will slowly starve to death, good work.

That’s right, a tree murderer. Or at the very least you’re a tree-tourturing vandal! Harsh we know, but at least we didn’t carve that label into you.

So with Valentine’s Day just around the corner and significant others all around the metro area racking their brains, trying to come up with a way to make this February 14th special, remind your loved one to put away the pocket knife. There’s nothing swoon worthy about a severed phloem or sexy about arbor abuse. Stick to the Hallmark cards and keep your PDAs off the rhytidome (bark) of Elmwood Park!