Tree Trimming and Pruning
Benefits of Professional Pruning
Complete Tree Trimming & Pruning in Atlanta, Georgia and surrounding areas.
This is the most common tree maintenance procedure. Why should you trim your trees on a regular basis?
- Improve the health of the tree. Dead branches are the prime area where decay can enter the trunk and other areas of the tree. Removal of these dead branches will promote healthy callus growth over these wounds.
- Improve the overall canopy structure. Trees with weak branch attachment points are very common in our landscapes. It is important to have a knowledgeable tree worker to know which branches to remove.
- Improve the appearance of the tree in the landscape. We all love looking at trees; proper pruning can return that overgrown and neglected tree back to its natural beauty.
- Mitigation of Risk. Many of our older mature urban trees can have multiple structural defects. During our spring and summer storms, these trees have a higher likelihood of failure. Our team works with one of the top Certified Arborist that specializes in Tree Risk Assessments. We can evaluate your tree using the latest technical tools to measure internal decay.
Particular types of pruning may be necessary to maintain a mature tree in a healthy, safe, and attractive condition.
- Cleaning is the removal of dead, dying, diseased, weakly attached, and low-vigor branches from the crown of a tree..
- Thinning is selective branch removal to improve the structure and to increase light penetration and air movement through the crown. Proper thinning opens the foliage of a tree, reduces weight on heavy limbs, and helps retain the tree’s natural shape.
- Raising removes the lower branches from a tree to provide clearance for buildings, vehicles, pedestrians, and vistas.
- Reduction reduces the size of a tree, often for utility line clearance. Reducing a tree’s height or spread is best accomplished by pruning back the leaders and branch terminals to secondary branches that are large enough to assume the terminal roles (at least one-third the diameter of the cut stem). Compared to topping, reduction helps maintain the form and structural integrity of the tree.
- Young Tree pruning quickly establishes a better-structured tree that will become stronger and require less maintenance in the future.
Don’t Top Trees!
Topping is perhaps the most harmful tree pruning practice known. Despite more than 25 years of literature and seminars explaining its adverse effects, topping remains a common practice.
Topping is the indiscriminate cutting of tree branches to stubs or to lateral branches that are not large enough to assume the terminal role. Other names for topping include “heading,” “tipping,” “hat-racking,” and “rounding over.”
Sometimes a tree must be reduced in height or spread, such as for providing utility line clearance. There are recommended techniques for doing so. Small branches should be removed back to their point of origin. If a larger limb must be shortened, it should be pruned back to a lateral branch that is large enough (at least one-third the diameter of the limb being removed) to assume the terminal role. This method of branch reduction helps to preserve the natural form of the tree.
However, if significant cuts are involved, the tree may not be able to close over and compartmentalize the wounds. Sometimes the best solution is to remove the tree and replace it with a species that is more appropriate for the site.