This job took our crew to a Publix shopping center in Melbourne, over in Brevard County, where a long run of Washingtonia palms lined the parking lot and had grown well past a tidy height. The fronds were heavy, the seed stalks were dropping, and the older growth had started to hang over the cars and walkways below. A grocery store lot never really stops moving during the day, so we did the bulk of this trimming overnight. Working after the store closed let us rope off sections, drop fronds, and stage debris without steering shoppers around the lift or blocking the fire lane. The photo here shows a cut frond coming down in the dark, lit by our work lights, with the ground crew standing clear of the drop zone. Trimming palms at height comes down to a controlled cut and a clean landing, and doing it at night on a busy retail site means the store opens as normal the next morning. At Roeling Green Lawns, we handle a lot of tree trimming for commercial properties where the work has to fit around business hours.
Reaching the crowns meant getting a lift in close to each palm. We ran an articulating boom out to full extension so a trimmer could work the top of every tree without climbing on questionable wood or spurring a healthy trunk. From up in the bucket, the crew cut away the dead and dying fronds, cleared the seed pods and flower stalks that make such a mess on pavement, and shaped each canopy back to a clean, matching look down the row. Palms are not like hardwoods. You are not thinning branches, you are removing spent fronds at the base and skinning old growth off the trunk without cutting into the green fronds the tree still needs. Cut a palm back too hard, the look some people call a hurricane cut, and you actually weaken it, so we left enough of each crown to keep the tree healthy. We moved the lift palm to palm straight down the parking lot island, keeping the bucket steady and the drop zone roped off the entire time.
By the end, the whole row read as one clean line again. Every palm carried a trimmed, matching crown, the pavement was blown clear of fronds and seed litter, and the light poles and signage were no longer buried in overgrown growth. We hauled off every bit of the debris rather than leaving piles at the edge of the lot for the property manager to deal with. Commercial palm work like this is something we schedule on a regular cycle for shopping centers, since a lot full of neat, well kept palms says a lot about how a property is run. If you manage a retail center, an HOA, or an office park around Central Florida and your palms or shade trees need attention, we can put together a maintenance plan and work around your hours. Take a look at the rest of our completed projects to see more of this kind of work.
