Tree Service in North Image, WA

Before the cul-de-sacs went in, this was flat working ground, and the planting that came with it outlasted the farms. Italian prune, an English walnut in the middle of a lawn, a filbert row somebody kept for the nuts, and Lombardy poplar set out dead straight to break the wind across a field that is now four back yards and a shed.

Newer landscaping came in with the subdivisions and mostly behaves itself. The calls come off the older stock — pruned every winter while somebody was picking from it, untouched since.

Fruit and Nut Trees Nobody Has Pruned in Thirty Years

An orchard tree is a built object. Take the pruning away and it runs tall vertical growth, carries fruit further out on limbs that were never meant to hold it, and tears out at the crotches — usually in August with a full crop hanging on. Old walnut does the same at a larger scale, and a walnut limb letting go is a serious piece of wood. Most of them can be brought back if the base is sound, but not in one visit.

• Staged structural pruning on neglected prune, apple, cherry and walnut
• Removal where the trunk is hollow at the base or the tree is simply finished
• Poplar and cottonwood taken down along old field and fence lines
• Stump grinding where a fence or a shop pad is going in over the old root plate

The Poplar Rows Were Planted for a Field That Is Gone

Lombardy and hybrid poplar went in as windbreaks and fast screens, and nothing in this county ages quicker. They decay from the top and from old pruning wounds, they drop limbs on still afternoons, and they were planted in a line — when one is bad, the rest of the row is the same age, the same clone, the same condition. The useful question is rarely which poplar to take. It is whether the row has a future.

Freezing Rain Does More Damage Out Here Than Wind

This side of town catches the cold air that spills out of the Gorge, and in a bad winter it can arrive as freezing rain instead of snow. Glaze ice finds the brittle wood first — poplar, birch, silver maple, old fruit limbs, anything carrying long horizontal weight — and it breaks things on a quiet night with no wind in it. That is a different pattern from the southwest gales that push firs over on the west side of the county, and it is why our calls here bunch up in January.

After ice, what matters is how the limb left. One that broke clean can be cut back to a proper point. One that stripped bark down the trunk on the way out is a different discussion. Do not let anyone leave a torn stub behind — that is where decay starts.