Pruning your trees every few years keeps them healthy and looking good. You may also need to cut back branches to end a safety hazard in your yard.

However, trimming trees can itself be dangerous if you’re not sure what you’re doing, and misguided DIY tree pruning may do your trees more harm than good.

We provide a quality tree pruning service in the Adelaide Hills for homeowners and businesses who want to keep their outside spaces safe and looking their best.

Trees Are Our Business and Our Passion

As professional arborists, we’re passionate about trees and their welfare, and as a small local business we care about our community. This is reflected in the way we work. We offer a first-class tree pruning service that fully meets the needs of our customers – and their trees!

Our tree pruning services include:

• Maintenance pruning – tidy trees make your yard a more pleasant place to relax and will impress customers visiting your business premises.
• Aesthetic pruning – taking standard pruning to the next level to bring out the best in your trees in terms of appearance.
• Tree pruning as a safety measure – overgrown or poorly maintained trees can put people and property at risk.

How Pruning Helps Your Trees

Besides enhancing appearance and eliminating hazards, our tree pruning service – selective removal of branches – can do wonders for the wellbeing of your trees by:

• Ensuring structural integrity of the tree.
• Removing decaying or dead branches to preserve the tree’s health.
• Promoting fruit or flower production.

Pruning an ailing tree can also be a crucial preventive measure that avoids the last resort of felling the tree.

How Do You Know Your Tree Needs Pruning?

Sometimes, it’s obvious a tree needs pruning. In many cases, though, inspection by an expert is necessary.

Signs that a tree needs pruning on health grounds include:

• Broken or splintering branches – not always immediately noticeable.
• Dead or diseased limbs – removal is necessary to protect the health of the rest of the tree.
• Misshapen trees – pruning will facilitate new, healthy growth.
• Storm damage – tree branches are typically robust but are vulnerable to gales and heavy rain.

Other reasons to prune your trees include:

• Branches growing close to power lines – this can create shock hazards, power outages and fires.
• Branches spreading over your home – a threat to the rooftop and the entire property.
• Branches overhanging your neighbour’s property – they won’t appreciate the reduced light and leaves being shed all over their yard.

Maintenance Pruning

Adelaide Hills Tree Services carries out maintenance pruning that not only helps to keep your yard neat but is also essential for the health of your trees.

Our maintenance pruning services are designed to give nature a helping hand to enable your trees to reach their full potential, with vigorous growth and a long life in good condition.

Maintenance pruning encourages healthy growth by:

• Opening up the tree canopy to allow air and light to filter through the entire tree – encouraging foliage growth and lessening the risk of disease.
• Removing dead, dying or diseased branches.
• Removing branches that are rubbing together to reduce damage to bark and cambium layer.

Aesthetic Tree Pruning

Aesthetic tree pruning is an art – and one that Adelaide Hills Tree Services has fully mastered. Our aesthetic tree pruning services can shape your trees into delightful-looking features that will improve the appearance of any yard or outside business space.

Aesthetic pruning entails enhancing the natural beauty of trees by design principles of scale, texture and form, while ensuring their long-term health is preserved or improved. A tree can also be trained into a shape that will fit its location better and promote foliage, flower and fruit production.

Taking inspiration from Japanese horticultural techniques aimed at visual appeal, aesthetic pruning shapes trees over time to optimise development of their natural form while maintaining balance and unity with their surroundings. This may include encouraging branches to grow in other directions than simply spreading out.

Tree Pruning for Hazard and Weight Reduction

Trees sometimes grow larger than desired for safety considerations. They may become overgrown and more likely to come crashing down in rough weather. Or weighty branches can snap off. Either way, it’s a situation that endangers everything around them – including your home and your family, or your business staff and visitors.

Pruning to prevent a tree from becoming dangerous by growing too big typically involves reduction pruning throughout the crown to reduce size and weight. Specific limbs can also be pruned to lessen weight load and reduce the risk of breaking during storms.

Our tree pruning for hazard and weight reduction is designed to make your trees safe without spoiling their appearance. It’s worth bearing mind that regular maintenance pruning will be necessary to keep the tree from becoming hazardous again.

Hazardous Tree Limb Removal

Besides posing a danger by becoming too heavy, trees can also become hazardous if their limbs start to encroach on your home or business premises – and the risk is heightened if you don’t get regular maintenance pruning.
Overhanging limbs can become weak and susceptible to breaking off without warning. If branches above a building break, they can cause expensive damage and endanger whoever is inside.

Tree limbs that overhang your neighbour’s yard can also break off and damage their property, while hazardous limbs near roads pose a risk to pedestrians and motorists. And, as we’ve already seen, limbs that grow towards overhead power lines can cause electric shocks, fires and power failures. 

Our Adelaide Hills tree pruning service solves the problem of hazardous limbs by ensuring adequate space between your tree and whatever it might be endangering.

It also allows you to avoid the dangers of DIY tree limb removal. While all types of tree pruning can be dangerous for amateurs, cutting back overhanging limbs can be particularly risky.

Pruning Mistakes That Can Damage Your Trees

There’s a lot more to tree pruning than simply shinning up a ladder and randomly hacking away at branches. Done right, pruning helps to maintain the long-term health of trees. Get it wrong and you can do irreversible damage.

Pruning a tree entails careful consideration of various factors to avoid damage. For instance, the wrong techniques to remove a branch can lead to disease penetrating the tree or hinder its ability to sustain itself through photosynthesis.

Common mistakes in DIY tree pruning attempts include:

• Cutting too close to the trunk, creating a large wound that won’t heal properly.
• Leaving too much of a stub, which reduces the tree’s ability to occlude the wound.
• Heavy pruning during the growing season, which can starve the tree by destroying too many light-absorbing leaves vital for nourishment. 
• Failing to keep pruning tools sharp, resulting in rough cuts that shred bark and can seriously damage your tree. 
• Cutting off the top of the tree, which can cause undesirable ‘epicormic’ growth which is poorly attached.

Why commercial businesses and homeowners choose our Adelaide Hills Tree Pruning Services 

Our tree pruning services are carefully planned and carried out, with the aim of encouraging healthy growth and enhancing appearance of trees, while ensuring they don’t pose a threat to people and property.

Householders and businesses in the Adelaide Hills and beyond get us to do their tree pruning because of the key qualities that underpin our company:

• Safety
• Efficiency
• Sustainability
• Ethically responsible
• Holding ourselves to a higher standard

We’ve been providing quality tree pruning services for more than seven years, with skilled arborists who use only the best tools and scrupulously comply with health and safety regulations and comply with industry best pruning practice. We also do a full clean-up after pruning.

Based in Hahndorf, our Adelaide Hills tree pruning services extend to the suburbs and Fleurieu Peninsula, and we also offer pruning as part of our Mount Barker tree surgery services.

Contact us to find out more about how our residential and commercial tree pruning services can make your property safer and more attractive.