It was a perfect summer Saturday in Medford, Massachusetts, a small suburb just west of Boston. Steve Mauras, fire department district chief of neighboring Somerville, was driving by a municipal park while running errands. He glanced at the impressive oak [...]

Robert Phillips It goes without saying that the tree care industry is filled with many people who are unsung heroes in the field of arboriculture. Robert Phillips most certainly is one of them. In this day and age [...]

Decay is a common defect that occurs in all parts of a tree. Decayed wood has very little strength and often leads to hollows, cavities or both. When decay or a hollow is present in a tree part, its load-bearing [...]

When a woman calling herself GoldenLarch logged into the TreeBuzz arborist forum in late 2020, she wasn’t looking for applause – she was looking for honesty. At 28, after leaving a customer-service career and earning a horticulture certificate, she’d fallen [...]

Every industry breeds its own folklore. In tree work, cutting, hinging and rigging theories might make for some of the loudest campfire stories of all. On a TreeBuzz thread dealing with these topics, a post about “rip cuts” lit up [...]