 In hiring professional tree care, write your own ticket, and focus on the foremanI well remember my boyhood introduction to tree surgery. Father had bought a few wooded acres on the outskirts of Winnetka, Illinois, our native heath, and there built a modest home. Mother now had happy scope for her love of gardening and of wild flowers, birds, and trees. We boys helped dig beds, plant borders, cut paths, and thin out the wild shrubbery. With or without Father's knowledge, Mother called in a company then newly and widely advertised throughout the Midwest, to come and trim her trees. They were mostly elms, oaks, ash, thorn apples, and hickories, none of imposing size or character, but Mother thought them too shaggy for her taste and their own good. I can still see the men in high laced boots with curved saws and pruning hooks on long poles. They dangled on ropes aloft in the trees, whittling stubs and overgrowth. They painted the cuts out of little cans slung from their safety belts. Tree techniques and equipment haven't changed much in half a century. I also remember the piles of brush the "tree surgeons" left for us boys to pick up and burn, and the strange new look our trees now had—too tame to suit a pair of teenage hunters and birds-eggers. In our private opinion Mother and her "surgeons" had just about ruined the Martin grounds, that is, made them less inviting to squirrels, crows, hawks, and other varmints. But we had to admit that the place looked much more civilized, more like the fine estates of richer families down along the lake front. |
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