What causes shoots keep coming up where the tree used to be?
Species behavior more than anything you did wrong. Tree of heaven, black locust, sweetgum, callery pear, mulberry, poplar, and elm sucker aggressively; oaks and nearly all conifers essentially do not. Cutting during the spring flush, when root reserves peak, provokes the strongest response. On a living tree, basal sprouting is usually a stress signal instead — root damage, trunk injury, drought, or a tree planted too deep.
What you'd see
A ring of vigorous shoots around the rim of a cut stump, or shoots pushing up through bare lawn several feet away, sometimes in a line that follows a root. The leaves match the tree that was removed. Cut them and they return thicker and more numerous than before. On a still-living tree, the same thing shows up as a thicket at the base of the trunk.
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