Tree service in Central Austin

Why your tree is probably regulated

Austin measures at 4.5 feet off the ground. Nineteen inches in diameter, any species, and you need a permit to remove it. Twenty-four inches, and if it's an oak, a pecan, an American or cedar elm, a bald cypress, a Texas ash, a Texas madrone, a bigtooth maple or a black walnut, it's a Heritage tree and removal is prohibited except under section 25-8-641.

In central Austin that isn't an edge case, it's the normal situation. A live oak planted when these houses were built is well past 24 inches now. So the first thing I do on a central Austin estimate is get a tape around the trunk, because the answer changes what the conversation even is: below 19 inches we're talking about what you want, and above 24 we're talking about what the code allows and what can be done to keep the tree instead.

There is a separate track for dead, diseased and imminent-hazard trees, and that's where documentation earns its keep. A written assessment from a Certified Arborist — there's an ISA Certified Arborist on my crew — is what turns a mitigation argument into a straightforward one. Get it before you file anything.

Construction is what kills these trees, not storms

Central Austin is being rebuilt lot by lot, and the way a heritage tree dies here is slow and starts with a trencher. Roots don't run deep, they run out, and the critical ones are in the top eighteen inches of soil spread well past the canopy edge. A new driveway, an addition, a pool, a utility trench, or six months of material stacked and trucks parked over the root zone will all do it.

The tree usually doesn't tell you for two or three years. Then the top thins, the leaves come in small, and there's nothing to be done about a root system that isn't there anymore.

If you're building, the cheap version of this problem is a fence at the drip line before anything arrives on site, and a plan for where material gets stacked that isn't under the tree. That costs nothing and it's the difference between keeping the tree and paying to remove it later under a permit you'll struggle to get.

No drop zone, ever

A 60-foot pecan in a Hyde Park back yard has a house on one side, a garage apartment on the other, a fence eight feet away and a power drop through the canopy. Nothing about that tree gets felled. Every limb is tied in, cut, and lowered on a line, then the brush comes out down a side path to the street.

That's the real cost driver in this part of town, and it's why two companies can quote wildly different numbers on the same tree: one of them is planning to rig it and one of them hasn't thought about how the wood leaves.

If there's a power line involved, know the split: the drop from the pole to your house is one thing, the primary conductors on the pole are another, and nobody but the utility touches those. There's more on that on the storm and hazard page.

What these trees actually need

Mostly less than people think. Deadwood out, weight reduced at the ends of the long limbs over the house, clearance off the roof and the walk, and then left alone for three to five years.

The mistake I see most in central Austin is a mature live oak that's been thinned hard and repeatedly, until it's a set of bare limbs with tufts on the ends. That tree is worse off structurally than it was: the weight is all at the tips, the interior wood that used to be shaded is now exposed to sun, and the response growth is weakly attached.

And the calendar, again, because central Austin is full of oaks. No pruning between February 1 and June 30 unless it's a hazard. For five months a year the right answer to a non-urgent oak job is July.