Why trim a healthy DeBary live oak instead of taking it out?
Because this one did not need to come out. The oak is in good shape; its canopy had just gotten low and one sided, limbs sweeping down over the lawn and out toward the driveway, close enough that mowing under it meant ducking. That is a pruning problem. We raised the lower limbs, cleaned deadwood out of the interior, and otherwise left the natural spread of the crown alone, which is all that ordinary tree trimming is supposed to do. Knowing which of the two you are facing saves real money in this city. DeBary requires a Tree Removal Permit through Growth Management for a healthy tree measuring six inches or more in diameter at breast height, or for anything classified as protected, specimen, or historic, and pruning carries no such requirement. So an owner weighing the two usually lands on the trim. That is the call Roeling Green Lawns makes whenever a tree is worth keeping, and this one has decades left in it. Worth confirming the current thresholds with the city before you schedule a removal, since ordinances get revised.
How much should come off a tall Washingtonia palm out front?
Less than most people expect. These two Mexican fan palms stand at the front of the house, one beside the garage and one out by the walk, and both were carrying a skirt of brown fronds plus a load of old seed stalks that had been dropping onto the driveway all season. Those came off. The green ones stayed put. The target arborists use is the nine and three line: picture a clock face over the crown and leave everything at or above horizontal where it is. That tight, pointed look some companies sell as a hurricane cut is worse than useless. UF/IFAS studied palms after the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons and found the severely pruned ones snapped their crowns far more often than lightly pruned palms, because the youngest leaves lose the bracing that older leaf bases give them. There is a nutrition cost as well. Florida sand holds potassium poorly, so a palm pulls it back out of its older fronds to build new ones, and cutting those fronds early takes the reserve with them.
What does it take to trim a palm this tall against the house?
It takes reach, and a plan for where every frond is going to land. This Washingtonia runs up the gable end of the house and clears the ridge by a wide margin, with barrel tile directly underneath it and a shorter palm crowded in beside it. Tile does not forgive a dropped frond. A dead Washingtonia frond is stiff, heavy at the butt, and long enough to catch a valley on the way down, and replacing a cracked run of that tile costs more than the whole trimming did. So we cut everything on the house side and handed it down instead of dropping it. That takes longer, and it costs a lot less than paying a roofer. How a crew gets up there depends entirely on the lot, and it is the first thing worth asking any company that quotes a palm this size. A lift needs firm ground and a clear path in, and a narrow side yard with a planting bed tight against the wall usually rules that out, which is the sort of thing we settle on the walk through rather than on the morning of the job. We took the other approach on a nearby tree trimming with a lift in DeBary, where the tree sat out in the open.
Do queen palms beside a pool cage need a different approach?
They need a slower one. These two queen palms sit right at the corner of the screen enclosure, close enough that anything leaving the crown lands on the cage. Screen itself is cheap. The frame is not, and neither is paying somebody to rescreen a panel two stories up. Queen palms also make more mess than most: they throw long flower stalks that ripen into heavy strings of orange fruit, and a spent queen palm frond weighs considerably more in the hand than it looks from the ground. We brought all of it down on a rope instead of letting it drop. We took the dead and yellowing fronds, pulled the seed stalks before the fruit could ripen and stain the deck, and left the crown full and rounded the way a healthy queen palm should sit. A pool cage frames the entire back view of a house like this, and a ragged palm parked in the middle of that view is the first thing anyone notices. Handling the whole property in one visit is what our tree service is built around.
What does the property look like once the crew packs up?
You get it back clean, with nothing left stacked at the curb. The back of this lot runs a line of white bird of paradise and saw palmetto along the property edge, and those clumps collect brown, split leaves the same way the palms collect dead fronds. We stripped them back to healthy growth, cut the spent stalks down at the base, and squared up the hedge wrapping the pool cage while we were there. Then it all went into the Bobcat and left with us. That last part is worth checking when you compare quotes. Curbside yard waste collection is not built for a load like this one, so a homeowner told to stack it out front ends up looking at that pile for weeks. Fronds, seed stalks, oak limbs, hedge clippings, all of it went on the truck, and the lawn and driveway got blown off before anyone left. There is more of this work in the rest of our completed projects if you want to see how a bigger job runs.