Trees and bushes
Trimming and pruning
Trees, bushes, pruning, planting, small limb removal and the leaf and debris clearance that goes with it, kept uniform and kept healthy.
Chapter 01
Uniform is a maintained shape, not a flat top
A sheared shrub is green on the outside and dead in the middle. Cutting only the surface makes a dense shell of new growth at the tips, that shell blocks the light, and everything inside it gives up. Then one hard winter takes the shell off and you are looking at bare sticks.
Cutting back to structure means going into the plant, taking whole stems out at the base, and letting light reach the middle again. It looks like less has been done and it lasts several times longer.
Trimmed bushes and shaped shrubs along a maintained property edge
Timing is most of it
A lot of shrubs set next year's flowers within weeks of finishing this year's. Cut those at the wrong point and you have not hurt the plant, but you have removed a whole season of flowering, and nobody notices until the following June.
The other half of the timing problem is northern Illinois weather. Cutting too late in the year pushes soft new growth out just in time for a frost to take it, which leaves damaged tips going into winter.
So the visit gets booked around the plant rather than around the calendar. If you call in the wrong month for what you have got, we will tell you and put you in the right one.
Chapter 03
Clearance work around the building
Small limb removal off rooflines, gutters, drives and windows is most of what people actually ring about. A branch on a roof holds moisture against the shingle and drops debris straight into the gutter below it. A branch over a drive scrapes a van roof once and then every time.
It is worth taking more than the minimum. Cutting a limb back to exactly the edge of the gutter means it is touching again next summer, so we cut back to a sensible clearance and to a point the tree can actually seal.
The debris is part of the job
Leaf and debris removal is the finish, not an extra line. What comes off goes on the truck.
If a bush turns out to be beyond trimming, or a tree needs real weight taken out rather than shaping, that is tree service rather than trimming and we will say so rather than quietly doing half a job.
Out of control trees and bushes brought back to a shape that holds.