A tree company that tells you when the tree can stay
We started because Lakeland's hundred-year-old canopy is at the age where every storm takes a piece of it, and too many of its best trees were being removed by crews with a chainsaw and no arborist — while the ones that should have come down were still standing over bedrooms.
Lakeland was platted in 1884 on the ridge between Tampa and Orlando, and the people who built it planted trees: the live oaks that make Dixieland and Beacon Hill what they are, the laurel oaks and water oaks that grew faster and are now at the end of their lives, the camphors of the 1950s, the sabals that were already here. Today the city has 56,000 public trees in 300 species, 38 named lakes, a 26 percent canopy and a City Tree Crew for the public trees. The private ones — the oak over your roof, the pine by your pool cage, the palm that went bronze — are the job we do.
Lakeland Tree Co. is a locally operated tree company — not a franchise, not a lead-gen call center — that books and manages tree work across Lakeland, Winter Haven, Bartow, Auburndale, Plant City and the rest of Polk County. The crews that work through us carry general liability and workers' compensation insurance, which Florida doesn't require of tree services and which you should insist on anyway; the certificate is available before anyone climbs. We have an ISA Certified Arborist on staff who looks at the tree before anyone sells you a removal, and who writes the hazard-tree letters under F.S. 163.045 only when a tree has earned one. And we've cleared this county after Charley, Frances and Jeanne, Irma, Ian and Milton.
What we stand on
Look first, then quote
An arborist walks the property, reads the species, the lean, the root flare and the decay, and tells you honestly whether the tree needs to come down. About half the oaks we're called to remove can stay with pruning. We'd rather tell you that than take the job.
Rig it, don't drop it
Trees over houses come down in sections on ropes. Palms are hauled, not chipped. Stumps are ground after 811 has marked the yard. The lawn is raked. You shouldn't be able to tell we were there except for the sky.
Prune to the standard
ANSI A300 cuts at the collar, under a quarter of the live crown, never topping, never lion-tailing, never a hurricane cut on a palm. A tree pruned wrong is a tree that fails in the next storm, and we won't do it even when it's what you were told you needed.
Answer the phone — 24/7
Hurricanes and thunderstorms don't keep office hours. Call at 2 AM with a limb through the roof and someone answers, a crew is dispatched by priority, and the paperwork happens after the tree is off the house. Crews work Monday through Saturday; estimates are usually scheduled within a day or two.