Certifications & Memberships

How to Love Your Trees to Death...

and Waste Money and Other Valuable Resources While Doing It!

1. Hire a landscape architect who is great at drawing pictures and who doesn't know anything about plant biology. They design many easily preventable plant health care problems, e.g. chooosing apple trees and junipers to be planted together. You need both trees in order to have Cedar Apple Rust. They over plant! Placing many small bushes and even trees next to each other, not anticipating for their real potential genetic growth. Another common mistake that they make on paper is planting a potential 80 foot tree underneath electrical wires or just outside the front stairs. This type of landscape will keep costing you right up until your final take down and stump grinding costs. Then you can go ahead and plant the same type of tree in the same spot so that the next generation can pay for the same take down and stump grinding.

2. Have an un-certified individual pick out your plant material.

3. Make sure that the nursery stock comes from South Carolina, so it won't survive our harsh Northern winters.

4. Hire the lowest bid landscaper who also has no plant biology background to plant your landscape architect's design.

5. Make sure that the burlap or other coverings are left on the soil ball, and make sure that the twine is left tied around the trunk. Many nurseries spray the burlap with copper sulfate so the burlap doesn't decay easily.

6. Make sure that the 200 pound plant is put in the hole, on top of loose soil, so when it settles, you can't see the flare of the tree or the first couple sets of branches are buried underneath the soil.

7. Then pile wood chips (or even better, dead cedar bark mulch) so it covers the trunk, causing decay and/or adventitious roots.

8. Make sure you go out and water the plant 'REALLY' for just five minutes.