Tree Trimming & Removal in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a city of narrow lots and old trees, and the two do not get along. A pine or a ficus planted sixty years ago on a 6,000-square-foot lot now has a house on one side, a fence on the other and a service line running through the crown. That is the ordinary job here, not the hard one.

It is also why almost nothing gets felled. Between the neighbour's roof and the power drop there is rarely a place to lay a tree down, so it comes apart in pieces on ropes and leaves in the chipper.

Why local knowledge matters in Los Angeles

Two things shape tree work in Los Angeles specifically. The first is the palms — thousands of them, most far taller than any ladder, and they need climbing rather than lifting. The second is the fire season: by late summer the inspectors and the insurance companies both start asking about clearance from the roof, and dry fronds and dead wood over a house are the first thing either of them writes up.

Access decides the rest. Hillside streets in Echo Park or Highland Park, alleys in Boyle Heights, permit-only parking on the Westside — where the truck and chipper can sit changes how the wood comes out and how long the job takes.

• Street and yard palms everywhere, most of them decades old and tall enough that fronds and seed pods come down on cars, roofs and people below
• Overhead service lines run through the canopy on a lot of residential streets, so clearance work is as much about what is around the limb as the limb itself
• Dense blocks with narrow driveways and street parking, which decides where the truck and the chipper can actually sit
• Santa Ana winds test every tree that has not been thinned, and the ones that fail are usually the ones carrying too much weight on the ends

Neighbourhoods we work in: Boyle Heights, Highland Park, Silver Lake, East LA, Echo Park, Hollywood.