Tree Service in Carter Park, WA

These blocks were laid out and planted while Vancouver was still a small town, and the canopy shows it. Walk the grid in July and you are in shade the whole way. Out in the newer plats the job is usually taking out something that outgrew its spot. In here, most of the work is looking after trees that could not be put back at anything like their present size.

Some of These Trees Cannot Be Replaced

The old Vancouver neighborhoods were planted out of a nursery list that went out of fashion a long time ago. Black walnut, horse chestnut, Norway and sycamore maple, sweetgum, a deodar cedar by the porch, the occasional giant sequoia standing over a bungalow. Plant a replacement this fall and neither you nor your kids will see it do what this one does.

So the first question on an old tree is what it would take to keep it — a reduction back to sound lateral limbs to shorten the lever the wind pulls on, or a cable through a fork that has started to open. Where the stem is hollow past the point anybody should stand underneath, we say so.

• Crown reduction on tall deciduous trees leaning over a low pre-war roofline
• Cabling and bracing where a codominant fork has started to open
• Deadwood cleaned out of a street-facing crown before it finds a parked car
• Stump grinding where the only way in is a three-foot side gate

The Wire Has Been Pruning These Trees for Decades

Primary lines run down these older streets, and the trees beneath them have been cut back off the conductors for as long as the wire has been up. That leaves a crown with everything on one side and a hole through the middle, and the tree spends the next decade throwing weakly attached sprouts into the gap. That regrowth is usually what comes out in a storm, not the original limbs. We can balance what is left and thin the sprouts on a cycle. What we will not do is put a saw near a primary conductor — that is Clark Public Utilities’ business, and anything touching a wire is live until they say otherwise.

The Ivy Has to Come Off These Trunks

Ivy is all through the old central Vancouver blocks and down the Burnt Bridge Creek greenway a few streets north, and it climbs. Up in a canopy it adds weight and sail to the worst part of the tree, holds damp against the bark, and hides every defect an inspection would otherwise catch. Cutting the vines through at chest height and clearing them back a couple of feet from the trunk kills everything above the cut. That is an afternoon with a hand saw, and the most useful unpaid thing a homeowner here can do.