Tree & Shrub Care in the North Shore & Northwest Suburbs

It depends on whether the plant flowers on old wood or new, which is a per-species answer rather than a per-visit one. Lilac and forsythia set next year's buds right after they finish blooming, so they get pruned immediately after flowering and left alone afterwards. Panicle hydrangea flowers on new growth and is cut back in late winter. Bigleaf hydrangea flowers on old wood and is pruned after it blooms. Get that backwards and the plant is perfectly healthy and simply does not flower.

Yes, and for oaks it is specific: April through July, with the highest risk in April, May and June. Fresh wounds attract the sap-feeding beetles that carry oak wilt, and the disease moves through root grafts between neighbouring oaks once it establishes. Elms carry a comparable risk in the same season. For most shade trees the dormant season is best anyway. The structure is visible without leaves, the ground is firm under equipment, and disease pressure is low. Dead or hazardous limbs are the exception and come out whenever they are found.

Look at it this year rather than next. Emerald ash borer reached northeast Illinois in 2006 and is now recorded statewide, and in an area that has had it a while, untreated ash survive at very low rates. The tells are canopy thinning from the top down, sprouting low on the trunk, bark splits, and the pale flecking left where woodpeckers have worked the bark for larvae. The decision is treatment or removal, and it depends on how much live canopy is left. A dead ash goes brittle fast, which makes removal harder and more dangerous the longer it waits.

If the brown side faces a road or a salted drive, that is almost certainly deicing salt spray. It shows as browning that starts at the needle tip and works back toward the base, concentrated on the road-facing side. Rock salt also stops dissolving below roughly fifteen degrees, so a cold snap tends to produce heavier applications and more spray. Flushing the soil in spring helps, a burlap screen over winter helps more, and when something has to be replaced, siting the new plant further back from the kerb helps most.

Stump work is handled case by case, because access and what is going in afterwards both change the approach. A stump in open lawn is straightforward; one between a fence and a foundation is not. If a replacement tree is going nearby, the grinding depth and how much of the spoil comes out matter, since a backfill of wood chips is a poor planting medium. Worth raising during the walkthrough so the quote actually reflects it.

More can usually be recovered than people expect, but not in a single afternoon. Cutting everything back hard at once removes the leaf area a plant lives on and can push an old shrub into a decline it does not come out of. Staged renovation pruning over two or three seasons, taking the oldest stems out and letting new growth come up to replace them, recovers a surprising amount. What is genuinely finished, and what is just neglected, is clear once someone has looked at it.