Just trying to settle disagreement. They say I haft to pay for the tree because its damage and it wont grow anymore.
No, a damaged tree is better for wildlife than a pristine one. If you are lucky, there will be a sap run from the damage.
My only Odinia specimen came from a trunk damaged like yours, where a strimmer had hit it.
Some stones to defend it from the lawnmower in future ?
Welcome to the forum, @Sharptreezz!
You might also try asking at https://www.reddit.com/r/arborists/
The tree should recover. Cutting away that loose flap of bark might help heep the wound dry, and avoid rot.
If it were my tree I would not replace it.
However, if you damaged someone else’s tree and they want you to pay for it, that gets a lot more complicated, and really depends on the circumstances of the damage more than the scientific question of whether the tree would heal.
And whether or not you want to keep them as a customer (assuming they paid you to mow, and your mower did the damage). They say the customer is always right.
That’s the first circumstance I pictured too, and of course a business should pay for damaging a customer’s property. It’s not just about keeping that customer happy, it’s about reputation and what they tell their friends.
On the other extreme, if OP damaged a friend’s tree while a guest at their home, it would be quite petty for the host to request payment.
If OP is a renter of the property the tree is on and the landlord wants reimbursement for damage, it may be worth arguing for giving it a year to see whether the tree recovers.
If OP parked on a neighbor’s yard and damaged their tree, whether to attempt to talk them into waiting and seeing probably depends on what the relationship is already like.
A shallow non-girdling injury on a tree that young should really have no lasting impact on it at all. But damaging someone else’s property and refusing to make things right can definitely have a lasting impact on business reputation or neighbor relations.
There was a tree in a local park whose bark was very badly damaged by animals - I bought some paste online and applied it to the damaged area - tree is still doing well over 15 years later.
Rabbits damaged a Basswood I planted worse than that and it kept growing. I cut it down this year, because it was getting worse and it had started a new trunk anyway. Now the new growth is about the same size as the one the rabbits chewed up.