Spring Pruning 101!

David Horvath from Davey’s Lake Bluff, IL, office talks about spring pruning, the importance of a certified arborist and how he got started with Davey.  

In this episode we cover:  

• How being on the lake influences David’s work (1:27) 
• What is being pruned now and why (2:28) 
• Patterns and differences in pruning different trees (3:05) 
• The technical aspects of pruning (3:40) 
• When you can prune it yourself and when to call an expert (7:10) 
• The art and science of pruning (8:08) 
• Pruning small trees (8:40) 
• The horror of topping trees (9:56) 
• Can an arborist save an improperly pruned tree? And the importance of hiring a certified arborist (11:20) 
• What shouldn’t be pruned in the spring (14:08) 
• How does topiary fit in? (16:12) 
• The importance of safety and having the right tools (17:54) 
• Cleaning tools to stop the spread of disease (19:43) 
• How David got started in the industry and with Davey (20:46) 

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.  

To learn more about taking care of your trees in the spring, read our blog, Tree Care Checklist: How to Keep Trees Healthy This Spring. 

To learn more about the importance of hiring an expert, read our blog, Benefits of Hiring A Professional Certified Arborist. 

To learn more about the best times to prune, read our blog, When is the Best Time to Prune Trees?  

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!    

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's Podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees Podcast, we know trees are the answer. This week, I'm joined by David Horvath. He's a sales arborist for the Davey Tree Expert Company in Lake Bluff, Illinois, north of Chicago and right on the water. Is that right, David?

David Horvath: That is correct. How are you today, Doug?

Doug: I'm doing great. Listeners can't see this, but in the background, David has a sign that says Arbor Lane. Now, I thought it was something made up from a specialty store, but that's not the story, is it?

David: No, it is not. We were at a flea market last summer at the Walworth County Fairgrounds. It's a big deal. They had buckets of street signs, and I was just going through there looking for either my name or my son's name, and I saw Arbor Lane. How can you not purchase that? I didn't even barter. Bought it for what it was, and up on the wall it went. My colleague's a little nervous because I have it held down with thumb tax, but it's been up there for a year now and it hasn't gone anywhere.

Doug: So far so good.

David: Exactly.

Doug: Today's topic is pruning. Before we get to that though, when I looked at the map at where you're at, does being right on the lake, does that change your climate or does that have any influence on what you're doing as an arborist?

David: It does. We're a little bit milder, I would have to say, in general, because of that lake springs tend to be a little slower to get going sometimes on that buffering effect. A lot of times we get spared from big, significant winter snowstorms. Something will be coming towards us and boy, as soon as it starts getting closer and closer, it'll break up. There's good and bad. I know for the last couple of years, we've had some really extensive droughts. Last year was just abnormally dry, but in '21, it was extremely dry. As every system approached us, it would just fall apart. That's largely due to the lake, is what I've always heard.

Doug: Let's get into pruning. Pruning is a mystery to me. First off, let's talk about why we're pruning now and what we are pruning now.

David: Sure. The biggest thing that we're pruning right now are oaks and elms, by and large. For a large part of that, it's really to prevent diseases or the spread of diseases. Some of the advantages of it, though, if we look outside of that trying to control disease, is we can see the structure of the tree really easily. We're pruning to identify poor structure, what a great time without the leaves disguising everything.

Doug: Is every pruning job different or do you see a lot of the same things? Let's just take an oak in general. Every time you look up there, is there something new or are there a series of, oh, this is one of the four things we always see?

David: I would say there are some patterns that we see, so you do get some generalizations. What can make a difference is different obstacles, different scenarios where the guys are going to be working aloft. Obstacles, that's a huge thing, and that leads to a variety of pricing, what the guys have to work around and protect.

Doug: For a homeowner whose feet are on the ground, and I must say that again, your feet are on the ground, do not leave the ground. If you have to leave the ground, you call an arborist. You call an expert. Could you talk a little bit about just the technical things about pruning? Let's say that they've learned what needs to be removed, and we'll talk about that. A lot of times I see people and they'll cut a branch that's too big right next to the trunk of the tree and it'll rip off bark and stuff. Discuss that a little bit.

David: Bigger branches, there's a lot of weight. If you look at it from almost the mechanics of it, if you don't have the ability to hold the branch with one hand as you're making a cut, just the weight of that is going to tear that bark off. There's different steps that the workers take. One of them simply is called a three-step cut, or sometimes it's called the jump cut. That prevents that tear out from the bottom of the branch. Quite honestly, I think what everybody overlooks is just the weight of the branches that are being worked with.

I hear that all the time. It's just that limb. I don't understand why it's going to take so long to take that off. From the ground, it might look like it's 4 inches in diameter, but in reality, it's maybe 6, 8 inches in diameter, and the weights are incredible. People can maybe relate by picking up a 2 by 4, but when we're pruning oak trees, that's a really, really dense piece of lumber, in a sense that's aloft.

Doug: You're cutting away first from the tree, is that right?

David: Correct. We do an undercut first, and then beyond or outside of that undercut, we're going to cut through. As that branch starts to go, it's going to start to break, and then that tear or break is going to meet the undercut. Then it's going to come off, and then what you have left is a stub. Then that stub is going to be your third, final cut. You can hold that typically with your hand. If you're using a chainsaw and you have both hands on that chainsaw, which you have to have, the piece is still small enough but there's not enough weight that it's going to tear off at the base. Some people have heard the term of branch collar. We leave that intact. We don't take it right up flush to the trunk.

Doug: What would you say there, a quarter inch or does it depend on the tree?

David: It does depend on the tree. What can be really interesting is with our oak trees, if they haven't been pruned in let's say a decade or more, oak trees hold on to their dead branches for a very long time. Sometimes that branch collar, each year that tree, what it's trying to do is it's trying to grow over that entire dead branch. We'll have branch collars sometimes that are 12 inches away from the trunk. We only cut up to that collar. There are some instances where it can look really weird. People think, "You left some huge stubs up there." We actually just went to that branch collar. It's important you keep that intact because that's less energy the tree has to expend to close that wound over.

Doug: When do I know if I should be pruning it or you should be pruning it?

David: If you have to go on a ladder, we should be pruning it. That's my number one rule. It is dangerous. People think they can handle it. I do sales. I don't even own a chainsaw anymore. I know and respect the people that do the work for me. It is dangerous work. They're getting training every day on safety protocols, and I listen in. Just because I don't do it every day, I have a wife and a kid that are more important than saving money.

Doug: I think we've all seen friends and acquaintances doing dumb things. Leave it to the experts, please. Let's talk a little bit about, I look at pruning from the outside as art and science. Do you look at it that way, or are you looking at it differently?

David: There is definitely a degree to it. With tree workers, you almost have two camps. There's the guys that have a real artistic eye about it, and there's guys that have a very scientific approach to it. Maybe there's not as much artistry there, but everything they're doing is for a very specific reason. Then you have the guys that blend the two together, I really like it if you can blend those two together.

Doug: Is there any way to, without seeing an illustration, to generalize pruning small trees like a crab apple or something like that? Or do I need a demonstration? Or do I need an illustration?

David: I would say to answer that, it really comes down to what is your objective with pruning, let's say, a crab apple? Is your objective to keep it a natural form? If your objective is to keep it a natural form, you really don't need an illustration. At that point, what you're doing is you're going to target pruning out the dead branches. After pruning out the dead branches, you're going to then target branches that are maybe broken, maybe have an injury to them, maybe they have a disease canker. You want to do that sanitation prune first. Then after that, you're looking at, do I have branches that are crossing and maybe directly rubbing against each other where that's causing an injury as well? Natural is what I prefer.

I think that's how trees are most happy. If you're going outside of that, then you might need some reference. If you're starting to look into maybe a practice of topiary, where you're creating a very specific shape for a design element.

Doug: Can we discuss the horticultural

horror of topping trees?

David: Well, we don't do it. Nobody should do it.

Doug: Yet, I see it. I see it.

David: We see it all the time.

Doug: It drives me crazy.

David: Yes, it is. Acutely you don't really see necessarily the consequences. To people that top trees it pushes out a lot of times with vigorous sprouts and to the layman it can look really nice, especially in the summer. All of a sudden it's thick and green again, and the tree is half its size, but in winter it looks like broom heads up there. You have just this long branch with a broom head at the top, but where all of those sprouts force from they’re weekly attached. A lot of times people top because maybe they're apprehensive or worried about the height of the tree, and they think it's going to fall apart in a storm, but once you've topped that tree and it forces all those sprouts, now you've really increased the likelihood of storm damage.

You get ice or snow and all those sprouts, you're moving your center of gravity out to the end as soon as those sprouts emerge. You get any weight on there, whether it's snow or ice, now you've increased the likelihood of failure.

Doug: When you come onto a property that has been, let's take for instance, improperly prune maple that has that broom lookup there. Can it be saved by a good arborist, or is it--

David: It can, but it's really, we're asking for a lot of patients from the homeowner. We're so used to everything getting taken care of in one step, but the process of restoring a crown after it's been topped realistically is three to five years, sometimes even more than that too. It's a slow process of selecting out some of those sprouts, leaving some. In some cases we have to reduce those sprouts a little bit, but that tree long-term is always going to have to be monitored. We're always concerned about that point of attachment where those sprouts arise from or arose from, they tend to be weaker in nature.

Doug: Well, that makes me feel good. Now, I've told this story a couple times on the podcast. My son buys a new house, the first day where they're visiting everybody's inside looking around. Well, I'm out looking at the trees and stuff. There's a guy that was coming every year and topping the maple. I go on a 20 minute tirade that almost makes my daughter-in-law start crying. I said, the tirade isn't about the tree damaging your property or anything like that. My tirade is that these poor people, before you were being taken. It was a chuck in a truck.

It wasn't a certified arborist who has a code of ethics. Then I go walking the babies through the neighborhood. This guy's working through the whole neighborhood. It really is, it drives me nuts that this can happen. That people get suckered into this and just speak for a minute about having a certified arborist and this code of ethics.

David: Yes. It is important. Certified arborists are not going to sell through fear. That's what a lot of these guys out there are doing that aren't certified in the industry. They're selling through fear. They're not looking out for the long-term relationship. They're just there to collect usually a lot of times it's cash. Certified arborists, we're trying to bridge that relationship between trees and people. We're really like the Lorax, right? The trees don't have tongues. We speak for those trees. That's a huge benefit of hiring someone that's accredited or that's certified.

Doug: David, I think I need to have a T-shirt made with that saying on there. That's pretty good. [laughs].

David: Hey, that's a good thing from the Lorax. That's a very good quote.

Doug: Now that we're pruning elms and oaks because we don't want to prune them during active growth because of diseases, but are there things that flower in the spring that we shouldn't be pruning, that we might lose our flowers?

David: Yes, if your goal is to retain as many flowers as possible, then that argument can be made for forsythia, for lilacs, for magnolias. If we prune them in the winter, whatever we're taking off, if there's a flower bud there, well, we've removed that. Now, it's not going to harm the tree. We're really talking about aesthetics here. Sometimes, a flowering pear would be a really good example of here's a spring flowering tree, but that's another one that we're adding to the list of oaks and elms. We don't want to prune those during the growing season, at least in the Chicago area, we have a lot of pressure from bacterial diseases that are now affecting our pear tree. Winter's an ideal time.

You know what, we're not topping the tree, so we're not removing all the flowers. We're going to be thinning the tree and taking out deadwood. You're still going to have a pretty good flower show. I remember being in school, that was something that was really promoted. Hey, if it flowers in spring, you better wait until right after flowering. That to me really applies if you're out there shearing, then you're going to lose all the flowers, but by and large, we don't shear. The only application where I can think shearing might be appropriate is really the system of topiary where you're pruning something into a goofy shape or a desirable shape.

That's where shears really belong, but outside of that, I really can't think of good instances where shearing is really beneficial for the plant. I mean, even on topiary, it's not beneficial to the plant. It's beneficial to us as homeowners for a specific objective that we have, but to the plant it's not beneficial.

Doug: What about that topiary? From your school. I want my plants to look natural, but I see meatballs and I see weird things and then at public gardens, you see fancy topiary. From an arborist point of view, and the health of a plant, how does topiary fit in?

David: What topiary does is, you're cutting indiscriminately, the leaves, the stems, the branches all at the same plane. When we're doing a high dose of pruning, what we forget is that high doses or high percentage of live growth removal promotes growth. Below that shearing cut, we get a proliferation of sprouts. Well, if you can imagine in your head, if you hold out your hand, that's a course structure, but if you were to cut the tips of your fingers off, and then if you imagine that under each cut, you get five more fingers that form, now you have this really thick layer on top, and it's coarse underneath. What that does is it almost creates like a tarp over the plant.

Within that, you have almost a greenhouse effect. It gets very humid, it gets very warm, and those are the conditions, and it's also shaded. Those are conditions that are very favorable for disease development. I always think of boxwoods. Boxwoods typically in a landscape are sheared, and that's where we start to see a lot of the issues, whether it's a volutella disease or it's boxwood blight coming in there because we've created an environment that's conducive to that disease.

Doug: Let's talk a little bit about tools and the importance of having sharp tools when you're doing this work.

David: Sharp tools are critical. Also, the right tool for the right application is critical. You're not going to use a chainsaw or a pole saw on something that's the diameter of your index finger, because that's too large of a tool and you're going to tear it. On smaller things up to three quarters of an inch, a lot of times that's going to be a bypass pruner. It makes a really clean cut. Once we start getting larger than that, we start going to hand saws. Then if it's a really big diameter thing maybe larger than 6 inches in diameter, that's where a chainsaw is appropriate. Again, if you're using a chainsaw call a professional. Homeowners think it's okay to reach over your head should never be done. I mean, very scary stuff there.

Doug: The fact I've done some podcasts about safety and the fact that the arborist that's using a chainsaw is wearing all sorts of special gear, including a pair of chaps. A chainsaw is so dangerous. I'm like you, I don't have one anymore, but in your 20s, you think, oh yes, I should have a chainsaw. I'm not going to pay to have this done. It's ridiculous.

David: I think [laughs] men in general. I think we tend to be guilty of having the Tim Taylor from tool time complex and we start to grunt when we see a chainsaw. You can't react fast enough for when things go wrong for chainsaw. You hope there's an emergency room close by if it does go wrong.

Doug: Now, when you guys are pruning, is there any application where you're afraid the tool might pick up something from one thing and go to another? How do you deal with that?

David: Absolutely. If we're removing in winter an elm tree that was infected and killed with Dutch Elm disease, well we have that pathogen on the chainsaw, so

you're really left with two choices. You can do a 70% alcohol solution and spray down the bar and let that evaporate. The other one is a bleach solution, 10% bleach. I'm not a huge fan of bleaches just because, boy, you start bleaching your clothing and tools start rusting. You got to have a lot of WD 40 to make sure things aren't rusting apart. I'm a bigger fan of the alcohol for sanitizing tools. That's a really good question. Very important.

Doug: Oh, I'm a big fan of alcohol too.

David: That's what Fridays are about, I think.

Doug: Before I let you go, I want to ask a little bit about your job and how you got into it. How was this job right for you?

David: I have been in the green industry since, gosh, I want to say I was a freshman in high school, and because I lived in the state of Wisconsin it was considered agriculture. They didn't care what age you were, I think. I really developed a passion. My boss, as a kid, such a wonderful horticulturalist. That really sparked my interest into this. Initially I was going to go into more of the landscaping realm. Probably 25 years ago I was snowplowing at 2:00 in the morning and I thought, I don't want to do this rest of my life. I saw a posting when there was that job service called Monster, and it was for a position out east.

I spent 10 years out east in New York. That was like a classroom out there for learning insects and diseases and trees. I tell you, within that first week of working in the field of arbor agriculture, I never looked back. I love what I do and coming back to the Midwest with the family and working with Davey, this is where I'm going to retire from, is Davey. I love this company. I love my job. I get to be a professional that educates my customers. It's not about meeting a quota or a contest. It is about doing what is right for the customer. Everything else falls into place.

I'm able to keep my ethics, I sleep well at night, and if I don't have something that fits for the customer, that's okay. I want them to learn. Something might happen in the future where they remember that situation or that experience with me, but you get a lot of referrals that way when you're just honest and you tell a person, look, I don't think there's anything we need to worry about right now. That's a really good feeling.

Doug: Well, David, I'm going to leave it right there. That is great stuff. Thank you for schooling us on pruning too.

David: My pleasure.

Doug: I know we will talk again soon. Thanks so much for your time. That was fun.

David: Thank you Doug, and I look forward to speaking with you again.

Doug: He's got the Arbor Lane sign up there behind him. I love it. Thanks again, David.

David: You're welcome. Have a good afternoon.

Doug: Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees Podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Do me a favor, subscribe to the podcast so that you'll never miss a show. Next week we have a very special episode highlighting some of the cool work Davey Arborists do, including using their climbing skills to set up a bald eagle camera. I can't wait for that one. If you've got an idea for the show or comments, send me an email to podcasts, that's plural@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S@D-A-V-E-Y.com. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees Podcast, trees are the answer.

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