I keep trees alive.

Yes — tree service is all I do, and Upper Arlington, Ohio is the only place I do it. I'm a solo arborist based right here in UA: pruning and tree trimming, crown work, tree health assessments, wound care, young-tree training, and storm response — my own hands on the tree work itself, never a subcontracted crew doing the diagnosis. Removals I spec myself and run with a crew I trust. Working one suburb is how I actually know the canopy.

It depends on the tree and the work — a single pruning visit is priced per job after I see it, and there's no charge for the assessment. For ongoing care there are two programs: the Soil & Nutrition Program — two lab-spec'd feedings and a winter report — and the full Tree Steward program, which includes it. Both are one number for the year, set by the tree count on your lot, and quoted in writing after the free walk. I don't post a rate card because a five-tree lot and a twenty-tree lot aren't the same job, and a number that fits both is wrong for one of them. Shrubs and ornamentals are tended per job. Text or call and I'll get back to you quickly with an honest estimate.

Yes. Tree trimming and structural pruning are the core of the work — deadwood removal, crown reduction and shaping, and formative pruning on young trees, done with hand tools first and cuts made at the branch collar so the tree can seal them properly.

Yes. When a tree genuinely has to come down I'll tell you straight, spec the job, and my crew takes it down right — priced fairly, no drama. And you get what a removal-only company can't offer: arborist's eyes on the tree as it comes down. I examine every branch and cavity to determine the cause of failure, and what that tree teaches goes into the chart for every other tree on your property.

Yes. Ohio Commercial Pesticide Applicator License No. 175653, member of the Ohio Chapter ISA, and fully insured. And you never have to ask for proof — every client's ArbKeep portal has my licenses and Certificate of Insurance right there to download as a PDF, alongside the photos and findings for each tree on your property.

Their trade is turf, and turf logic applied to a hundred-year organism is how trees die slowly around here. The business runs on efficiency — mow it fast, move to the next one — and that means a 1,500-pound riding mower swung around your trunk every week. Every pass scuffs bark and crushes the surface roots that sit in the top few inches of soil doing most of the tree's breathing and drinking. It isn't one dramatic wound; it's chronic injury on a weekly schedule, plus a string trimmer at the flare and a mulch volcano on top. Mechanical damage like that is one of the leading causes of death in landscape trees, and nobody ever connects it to the decline they call me about five years later.

Then there's the chemistry: the broadleaf weed killer that keeps a lawn clean is designed to kill broadleaf plants — and your tree is the biggest broadleaf plant on the property, with roots running out under that entire lawn.

And I'll say the quiet part: in Upper Arlington, grass is the number one invasive species. We irrigate it, feed it, poison for it, and run engines over it all summer — all to maintain a monoculture that competes with the roots of the canopy that actually makes this neighborhood worth living in.

Because it's already running the best soil program on your property. A tree sends a large share of the sugar it makes down to its roots and releases it into the soil — deliberately — to feed the fungi and bacteria that in turn hand back water and nutrients it can't reach alone. Put the right species on the right soil and that engine largely runs itself, and the ground gets richer every year. My job is mostly to protect that engine: keep the flare open, keep the root zone from being compacted and poisoned, and correct the one or two things the lab says are actually missing. Most of what I do is subtraction.

Mine is measured — that's a different and better question, and I say that as someone who grew fruit organically by hand on our family's orchard. I'm not squeamish about the materials; I've spread them. Organic tree & shrub care usually means composted poultry litter, blood or feather meal, fish emulsion, or a brewed microbial tea. Those are real materials with real uses. Here's the problem on a mature landscape: they're mostly nitrogen and phosphorus, and that is rarely what an Upper Arlington tree is short of.

Nitrogen pushes fast, soft, succulent growth — exactly what aphids, scale, and borers prefer, and growth the tree funds by spending down its own defenses. Phosphorus is worse, because our suburban soils are already loaded with decades of it, and surplus phosphorus suppresses the mycorrhizal fungi your tree is feeding on purpose — you pay to weaken the engine described above, and the excess runs off toward the Scioto and, eventually, Lake Erie. Manure also carries soluble salts into a root zone that didn't ask for them, and none of it touches the actual limiting factor here: our high-pH, lime-buffered ground locks up iron and manganese, and no amount of chicken litter unlocks it.

So who do I trust? University agricultural labs — the soil scientists at land-grant schools who run the panel, report the chemistry, and have nothing whatsoever to sell you. No product line, no program, no upsell. Just your numbers.

Then I do the part nobody else here is doing: I read those panels property by property, across our neck of the woods, and hold them against what the trees are actually doing in the ground. Your yard isn't a region or an average — it has its own chemistry, and the pattern only shows up if somebody is sampling the same few square miles over and over. What's genuinely limiting in Upper Arlington soil is specific, it's local, and it is almost never the nitrogen in a bag of manure. You don't learn that from a label. You learn it from a lab, and then from doing this on the next street over, and the next.

Yes — trunk injection on a multi-year cycle. An untreated ash in central Ohio is a tree on a timer; a treated one can outlive the outbreak.