TREE PRUNING AND MAINTENANCE

Trees enhance our lives in many ways including cleaning the air, producing oxygen, and making our surroundings more beautiful and enjoyable. Proper tree care is essential to ensure that our trees remain beautiful and healthy not just for our lives but for generations.

Proper tree pruning can have many benefits to the property owner as well as to the tree. 

• Support the survival of the whole tree

• Reduce chance of failure of the stem or branch

• Increase visibility for safety concerns like road signs

• Prevent damage to homes or buildings

• Provide clearance for utilities

• Maintain road access for vehicles

• Providing unobstructed paths for pedestrians

• Maintaining the health and beauty of the tree

In fact, failing to properly prune trees can have adverse consequences. Dead branches, weak stems, over-extended branches, and suckers, which are growths that rob resources from the tree, can pose risks to public safety and should be addressed by an arborist.

Young trees should be pruned to establish a strong branch architecture as the tree grows. Once trees mature, pruning is done to remove broken or diseased branches to protect the whole tree. Mature trees are also sometimes pruned to provide space for other plants, buildings, infrastructure or human activities.

While there are many benefits to tree pruning, not all pruning is good for the tree. A tree is a living organism, and like all living organisms damage must be repaired. When a tree is pruned, it must expend substantial energy and resources to repair the open wound. This is energy that might better be spent on leaf development to create the beautiful full canopy that makes our treescape so enjoyable.

Further, trees get their energy by combining sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create sugar through a process called photosynthesis. Trees use this energy to grow, remain healthy, and to produce leaves. Pruning live branches removes some of the tree’s ability to collect sunlight reducing its capacity to photosynthesize. 

At Full Canopy Tree Care, our arborist will talk to you, examine your trees and your property and discuss the most appropriate tree pruning plan. We advise against pruning just for the sake of pruning. In fact, routine pruning of live branches on healthy trees does not improve tree health. We will help you understand a tree pruning plan that will help your trees stay safe, healthy, and beautiful for you and future generations.

As certified arborists, we are not only trained in the proper pruning techniques and principles, but we also stay up-to-date on local laws concerning tree pruning. Georgetown has some very specific laws concerning tree pruning, even to the point of requiring a certified arborist to be hired to prune certain types of tree, with a very large fine for violating the ordinance. Regulations concerning disturbing wildlife also have to be considered.

Our inspection will include the trees to pruned as well as the surrounding area.

• Identifying the reasons of branch removal, such as dead branches, overextended branches, or branches threatening building structural elements

• Risks to consider near branches to be removed, such as electrical wires, buildings, etc

• Number of branches to be removed

• Diameter of branches to be removed

• Proper type of cuts to be used to remove branches

• Worker safety considerations

• Signs of wildlife nesting

Tree pruning is an important part of proper tree health care. Improper techniques like lion-tailing, a method that removes all branches on a limb leading to just a puff of foliage at the end of the branch, can actually harm the health of a tree. 

 At Full Canopy, we hire only tree care experts who love trees as much as we do. Our company is built on a culture of recognizing the importance of trees and working hard to make the trees in Georgetown beautiful and healthy enough to last for many generations to come.