  We consider the total cost of cutting down a random rooted tree chosen from a
family of so-called very simple trees (which include ordered trees, $d$-ary
trees, and Cayley trees); these form a subfamily of simply generated trees. At
each stage of the process an edge is chose at random from the tree and cut,
separating the tree into two components. In the one-sided variant of the
process the component not containing the root is discarded, whereas in the
two-sided variant both components are kept. The process ends when no edges
remain for cutting. The cost of cutting an edge from a tree of size $n$ is
assumed to be $n^\alpha$. Using singularity analysis and the method of moments,
we derive the limiting distribution of the total cost accrued in both variants
of this process. A salient feature of the limiting distributions obtained
(after normalizing in a family-specific manner) is that they only depend on
$\alpha$.
