Tree Trimming in Fayetteville, AR

Pruning is where most tree damage in this town comes from

More Fayetteville trees are ruined by bad pruning than by storms. The usual culprit is topping, where the crown is cut back to stubs to make a tree smaller. It works for about two seasons. Then the tree responds to losing its canopy by pushing out dense clusters of fast, weakly attached shoots from the cut ends, and five years later you have a taller tree with worse structure than the one you started with, plus large open wounds that never sealed.

We do not top trees. What we do instead depends on what you are actually trying to solve, and there is usually a specific cut that solves it.

Crown cleaning

Removing the dead, dying and broken limbs out of the canopy. This is the single highest-value pruning most mature trees get. Dead wood in a big oak is what comes through a windshield in the first strong gust of spring, and taking it out changes nothing about how the tree looks from the street.

Crown thinning

Selectively removing interior branches so wind moves through the canopy instead of pushing against it like a sail. Done properly it reduces the load on the trunk in a storm and lets light down to the lawn underneath. Done badly it strips the interior and leaves all the weight at the ends of the limbs, which is worse than not touching it.

Crown raising

Taking the lowest limbs off to get clearance over a driveway, walkway, roofline or line of sight. This is most of what people actually want when they call about trimming.

Structural pruning on young trees

The cheapest tree work you will ever buy. Correcting a competing leader or a bad branch angle on a fifteen-foot tree takes twenty minutes and prevents the split trunk that would cost you a whole tree coming out in thirty years.

When to prune

Late winter, while the tree is dormant and before the spring push, is ideal for most hardwoods here. The structure is visible with the leaves off and the tree seals cuts quickly once it wakes up.

Oaks are the exception worth knowing about. Pruning oaks during the growing season creates fresh wounds that attract the beetles carrying oak wilt, so we avoid non-urgent oak pruning from roughly April through July. If you are seeing decline in an oak already, that is a different conversation, and our tree health page covers it.

Dead, hanging or hazardous limbs get removed whenever we find them. Season does not apply to something about to fall.

What it costs

Pruning is priced by the tree, based on size, how much is coming out, and how much of it has to be lowered on ropes rather than dropped. Clearing deadwood from one large oak over a driveway is a different job from thinning three ornamentals in an open front yard. We come look and give you a written number.