Five steps, and you get paper at three of them.

The walk

Someone comes out and walks the property with you. It takes half an hour to an hour depending on how many trees there are. We start at the bottom of each tree, not the top: root flare first, looking for a stem that goes into the ground like a telegraph pole instead of flaring out, for mushrooms or a shelf fungus at the base, for a trench somebody cut through the root zone for a cable two summers ago. Then the trunk, then the unions, then the crown.

You will get asked what the tree is doing that bothers you, which is a different question from what you want done to it. Half the time the answer changes the job.

The written scope

Before anything is priced as a lump, the work is written out tree by tree: this oak, this limb, this cut, this much clearance. Reductions get a target — “eight feet off the roofline” — rather than an adjective. Removals say where the wood ends up. Stumps say how deep.

If you asked for something we are not going to do, it goes on this document as a refused line at zero, with the reason, exactly as it will appear on the card at the end. You should not find out on the day.

Your approval, line by line

You can strike a line. The number moves by that line’s amount and nothing else, because the lines were priced separately in the first place. This is the point of writing it that way.

We do not hold a date against an unsigned scope, and nobody will ring you to say a crew is “in the area anyway.”

The day

The crew arrives, and before a saw starts the ground worker walks the drop zone and the fall path of anything being rigged, and moves what can be moved: furniture, grill, the ceramic pot nobody mentioned. Ropes go in from a throwline rather than by spiking a tree that is staying.

If a limb has to come down over something that cannot be moved, it is rigged: tied off above the cut, lowered on a friction device at the base rather than dropped. That is slower and it is most of why a tight backyard costs more than an open lot.

Two things get checked before the truck is packed: that every cut is outside its collar, and that the ground is raked rather than blown into the neighbor’s hedge.

The card

You get the work order shown on the front page: each tree by species and position, what was done, what it cost, and any line refused. If we found something while we were up there that you should know about — included bark in a union, a cavity you cannot see from the ground, a root plate that has moved — it is written on the back rather than mentioned in passing.

Keep it. If you sell the house it is evidence the trees were maintained, and if another company tells you something alarming in three years, you have a baseline.