Tree service in East Austin

What the ground is doing here

The Blackland Prairie soils east of I-35 are the opposite problem from the west side. There's plenty of soil, several feet of it, dark and fertile. It's also vertisol clay, which means it changes volume with moisture. In a dry summer you can watch cracks open in a lawn wide enough to lose a tape measure into.

Trees don't like that. Every shrink-swell cycle tears through the fine absorbing roots in the top foot of soil, which is where a tree does most of its drinking. The tree survives it and regrows them, but it costs energy, and a tree already carrying another stress shows the bill in its canopy: smaller leaves, thinner top, dieback starting at the branch tips.

I get called out to look at that dieback constantly, and the honest answer is usually that nothing is wrong with the tree that a different watering habit wouldn't fix. Slow, deep water out at the drip line during a drought — not at the trunk, and not a sprinkler's ten minutes. Then three inches of mulch under the canopy instead of grass, which keeps the moisture swing down and stops the cracking in the first place. That is a cheaper fix than anything I do with a saw, and I'd rather tell you about it than sell you a trim.

The pecans are the story over here

East Austin has some of the best mature pecans in the city, a lot of them in yards that were orchards or bottomland before the houses arrived. They're worth keeping and they need two things from you.

The first is weight management. Pecan wood is strong but the tree grows long, heavy, nearly horizontal limbs, and it drops them — often on a still day in late summer, which arborists call summer branch drop and nobody can predict precisely. The useful response is taking weight off the far ends of the longest limbs over things you care about, rather than thinning the middle of the canopy.

The second is not being surprised by web worms and by the years it produces almost no nuts. Neither of those is killing your tree. Pecans alternate heavy and light crop years, and webworm damage late in the season is cosmetic on a mature tree.

Cedar elm is the other constant. It's tough, it handles this clay better than almost anything, and its failure mode is co-dominant stems with bark trapped in the union. That's the split that comes apart in a storm, and it's the thing worth looking at on an elm before it happens.

Access, alleys, and the 19-inch line

Older east Austin lots are small, the houses are close to the fence line, and a lot of the properties are served by an alley rather than a wide drive. That changes the job. A pecan in a back yard with alley access is straightforward if the truck fits and slow if it doesn't, because then every piece of wood and every barrow of brush comes out through the side gate.

It's worth telling me about the gate width and whether there's an alley when you call. It's one of the few things that reliably changes my estimate.

On permits: the same city rules apply here as everywhere else in Austin. Any species at 19 inches diameter measured 4.5 feet up needs a permit, and at 24 inches a pecan or a cedar elm becomes a Heritage tree, which most east Austin yard pecans comfortably are. The permits page has the thresholds and the city's own source documents.

What I'd do first if it were my yard

Deadwood over the house, before storm season. That's the highest-return tree work there is anywhere, and on a big pecan with limbs over a roof it isn't close.

Then mulch. Then, if the tree has long limbs reaching over something expensive, take weight off the ends of those.

What I would not do is a heavy interior thin-out on a mature tree because it looks untidy. That triggers weak regrowth you'll pay to remove again in three years. The trimming page explains where that line is.