Eight kinds of work.

What we don’t do

Worth saying, because the list is short and it saves everyone a visit.

• Topping. Not on oaks, not on crepe myrtles, not the week before you sell the house. If reduction won’t get you where you need to be, the honest options are removal or living with the tree, and we will say which.
• Hurricane cuts on palms. Same reason, different plant. See palm care.
• Anything near a primary power line. Conductors on the road side of your property belong to the utility. We are not line-clearance qualified and we do not pretend the distance is fine.
• Spikes on a tree that is staying. Climbing irons put a hole through the bark every step. They are for removals.
• Deep root fertilizing as a default. If a soil test says the tree is short of something, that is a reason. “It looks tired” is not.

How the price is put together

Tree work is priced by risk and access far more than by height. The same forty-foot laurel oak is a two-hour job in an open pasture and a full day between a screen enclosure and a neighbor’s roof.

What moves the number, roughly in order:

• Whether there is a drop zone, or whether every piece has to be rigged and lowered.
• What is underneath — a cage, a septic drainfield, a paver deck, an irrigation manifold.
• Whether a truck and chipper can get within a hose length of the tree, or whether it is all carried out by hand through a five-foot gate.
• Dead versus alive. Dead wood is unpredictable to climb and is priced accordingly.
• What happens to the wood: chipped, stacked, cut to length, or hauled.

All of that goes on the written scope as separate lines, so you can take one out and see the number change instead of being handed a single figure.