Tree Service in St. Augustine South, FL

Drive Old Moultrie Road and look up. A huge share of the canopy is laurel and water oak, planted deliberately in the postwar building boom because they grow fast and throw shade in ten years instead of forty. The trade-off nobody mentioned at the time is that these species typically live 50 to 70 years and start decaying internally well before that.

What we see now, across street after street, is the result: hollow trunks, conks at the base, big limbs shedding in summer storms, and canopies that thin out a little more each spring. Some of these trees still have years left. Some are one saturated week away from going over. Telling those apart is a diagnosis, not a guess, and it is the most common reason people in this neighborhood call us.

When a laurel oak does need to come out, we push customers to replant a live oak. It is slower — you are planting for the next owner as much as yourself — but the tree lasts centuries instead of decades.

Lots here run modest, houses sit close together, and many back yards are accessed only through a side gate. There is almost never a clean drop zone for a 60-foot oak, so nearly everything is climbed, sectioned, and lowered on rigging lines. It is slower work than an open fell, and it is the difference between a clean job and a hole in your neighbor’s roof.

The other constant here is septic and irrigation. Plenty of properties in the older sections have drain fields in the back yard, and we plan equipment routes and drop zones around them. A chipper truck parked on a drain field is an expensive mistake.

Practically, being based in the neighborhood means faster estimates and faster storm response. Robert can often swing by the same day for an estimate, and after a storm we start where we can get to first, which is here.

It also means our reputation is unusually local. A lot of our work in St. Augustine South comes from neighbors who saw us on the street or got a recommendation over a fence, and that keeps us honest in a way advertising never does.