Tree Pruning & Trimming in Knoxville and East Tennessee

Pruning is the work that keeps a tree rather than replaces it, and it is where the difference between a tree service and a man with a saw shows up soonest. A bad removal is over in a day. A bad pruning job is visible for the next twenty years, whether the tree stands in a Knoxville front yard or on a Union County fence line.

How we prune is not complicated to describe. Cuts land at the branch collar so the tree can seal them, we do not leave stubs, and we do not top trees. Topping is still common around here and it is the single most damaging thing anyone does to a mature tree: it removes the crown the tree feeds on, and what grows back is a mass of weakly attached shoots that are more likely to fail than what you started with.

What we are usually asked to do. Twenty-one of our jobs involved pruning. Most fall into a few shapes — clearing limbs off a roof or a gutter line, taking out crossed, dead, diseased or split branches, lifting a canopy off a driveway, reducing a spread that has got away from the house, and freeing a line. One Andersonville job included freeing a telephone line from a tree by the driveway. Another asked us to reduce two Bradford pears by about a third and take out the specific verticals that were splitting them apart.

Sometimes the answer is to prune less, or not at all. On a Fountain City job the customer asked about felling a large leaning red oak in the back yard. We priced the limbs that were genuinely threatening the shed, and recommended leaving the tree standing. That happens more than people expect. A leaning tree is not automatically a dangerous one, and a healthy oak is worth more in the yard than on the truck.

Bradford pear is its own conversation. They were planted everywhere from the 1960s through the 1990s, which puts most of them at the age where the trunk splits. The limbs leave at the same height at a narrow angle with bark trapped in the union, so there is no real wood holding them on. Reduction pruning buys time. It does not fix the structure, and we will tell you which one you are paying for.

Timing matters for some species and not for others. Ask when you call and we will tell you whether it is worth waiting.