Pruning & Removals

Pruning

Landscape trees require a higher level of care than do their forest counterparts. A professionally maintained yard tree is both safe and attractive. You can protect your investment in your trees by hiring an arborist from the Johnson Tree Company (JTC) who understands your tree’s response to pruning.

JTC suggests you have your trees correctly pruned while they’re young so they’ll grow into structurally-strong trees with the proper form and function for your landscape. Trees pruned appropriately when they’re young will require less corrective pruning as they mature.

Mature trees that have been properly maintained will require very little structural pruning. However, there are times (especially following damaging storms) when some maintenance pruning or restorative pruning may be necessary. Pruning of this type enhances your tree’s health, appearance and structure. Pruning like this is accomplished by:

 • removing dead, damaged, and broken branches

 • reducing the weight of heavy extremity branches

 • thinning to reduce wind resistance, and

 • culling the tree’s crown and inner branches/leaves for symmetry.

The importance of proper pruning cannot be overemphasized. Improper pruning causes permanently disfigured and grotesque trees that detract from your property’s value and shorten the tree’s life. One common type of tree-killing procedure that is still practiced by many novice tree people is called "topping" or "hat racking."

To learn more about proper pruning and about how to select a professional tree pruning company, see the web site for the International Society of Arboriculture.

Removals

JTC specializes in removing large, hazardous trees. When correctly undertaken, this type of work requires immeasurable skill in heavy rigging operations and aerial roping and climbing. This type of tree work is life-threatening; it demands extreme vigilance for above-ground safety techniques. Many people are killed or seriously injured every year in the United States because of their inexperience or haphazard approaches to this type of arboricultural work.

It is one thing to cut and drop a tree in the remote solitude of the forest. It is quite another to remove a large tree that towers 100-ft. over the top of valuable property and living souls inside a home or office building in an urban neighborhood. Paul Bunyan, his blue ox Babe, and other macho tree cutters need not apply.

JTC has the experienced crewmembers with the proper skills, tools, and equipment to handle any large or hazardous removal. But unlike Paul Bunyan and his modern-day equivalents, JTC is fully insured for your protection and for ours.