St. George Tree Service
St. George, Ontario
Free written estimates (226) 546-3835
Crown thinning and canopy reduction get bought here for two quite different reasons, and it is worth knowing which one you have before anybody quotes.
One is light. The other is load, and they want different work. Ring (226) 546-3835.
On shaded ground with heavy silt underneath, nothing grows. The lawn thins to moss, the beds sulk, and the assumption is usually that the soil needs feeding.
It rarely does. What it is short of is light, and crown thinning is the answer — taking out a proportion of the smaller branches evenly through the crown so the tree keeps its shape and size but stops being opaque.
Twenty-five per cent of living crown is about the practical maximum in a single visit, and a veteran wants considerably less. Beyond that the tree responds by pushing out replacement growth that is denser than what came off, and you have made the problem worse while paying to do it.
Crown thinning also helps the ground itself. Less interception at the canopy means more rain actually reaching the soil rather than running off the leaves at the drip line, which on compacted clay matters.
The second reason is wind, and it is the one that gets ignored until something fails.
A crown that thick catches wind the way canvas does. On the shallow, wide root plate that St. George's ground produces, that sail is attached to an anchor which is broad but not deep. Crown thinning lets gusts spill through instead of pushing against, and canopy reduction shortens the lever arm itself.
Nobody should sell crown thinning and canopy reduction as a safety measure. What they do is take load off, and less load means less risk, which is worth the money - but nothing done in the crown helps a rotten butt or a plate that has already shifted.
In canopy reduction each limb finishes on a side branch substantial enough to become the new tip — as a rule around a third of the diameter that came off. The tree keeps a natural outline and every cut limb still has a living growing point on it.
Topping cuts wherever was convenient. What comes back is a thicket of weak growth held only in the callus skin over the cut rather than in solid timber, and within five years the crown is heavier, denser and weaker than before, sitting on top of decaying stubs.
Write a reduction as a measurement, not a proportion. "Take the two lowest limbs back about two metres" is something you can stand under afterwards and verify; "reduce by twenty per cent" is not.
A tree that is simply too large for the garden will always be too large for the garden. Thinning and reduction purchase time and then need doing again. Occasionally the straight answer is to replace it with a species that fits.
There is no reversing a topping job once it has been done. From there the choice is an indefinite programme of cutting the regrowth back, or taking it out.
And a suspect fork is a cabling and bracing question, not a thinning one — though taking leverage off it helps either way.
Tell us whether it is light or load you are worried about and we will tell you which one you actually have. Ring (226) 546-3835. The home page is the other way in.
Jobs here rarely turn out to be one thing. This is the rest of what we cover.
Tree trimming and pruning in St. George happens against an unusually high local standard, because there have been commercial apple orchards on Howell Road for two centuries and orchard work is the most disciplined tree trimming there is.
View Tree Trimming and Pruning
Dead branch removal around St. George is dominated by one species. When the village had its forests surveyed for the servicing study, seven community types were recorded and two of them were ash — a white ash forest and a sugar maple and white ash forest.
View Dead Branch Removal
Storm calls are taken outside working hours right across St. George and South Dumfries. Something blocking the drive, a limb punched through the garage, a trunk lying on the bonnet.
View Emergency Storm Damage Cleanup
Tree removal is the last thing on our list rather than the first, and most of the calls we get about it turn out to be tree trimming jobs. But some trees are finished, and pretending otherwise is expensive.
View Tree Removal
Tree cabling and bracing exists for one situation: a tree worth keeping, with a structural fault in the crown rather than the base, over something worth protecting.
View Tree Cabling and Bracing
Grinding is quoted on its own rather than bundled into the felling, since plenty of people are perfectly content to see the tree go and leave the stump where it is.
View Stump Grinding and RemovalTwo facts get it started — how the tree is behaving, and what stands in its fall. A climber attends, and the quote that follows names each cut, each figure and everything deliberately excluded.
Detail helps. Species, height, the access down the side, how the lawn has been lately — each of those changes what we bring and what it costs. The one compulsory field is somewhere to send the answer. If a conversation suits you better, ring (226) 546-3835.