I have a fairly large yard with several trees, three of which are maples and fairly ordinary…read more There's a river birch in the front, though, which is the reason I bought this house: it's that beautiful and unique and enormous. It has some dead wood in it that I thought might need to be removed. My partner emailed Eshleman's Tree Care because we had used them before and that had gone very well. In that email my partner unfortunately used the term "raise the canopy" for what needed to be done, but when the business owner came out in person to do an estimate, they did not discuss that. My partner in fact told him that we did not want the lower branches removed, which is what "raising the canopy" seems to mean to most people: removing them. (Which, by the way, lets a lot more sunlight onto your grass and elsewhere, which is a reason someone might want it as well as a reason someone might not.) So that communication, a face to face conversation that lasted for several minutes, should've told the owner that no canopy raising was to be done. if emails from customers end up being the crew's work orders, he should've noticed the contradiction of my partner's request not to remove those branches with the email and pointed it out; after all, he's the expert, supposedly. Unfortunately he apparently did not convey the change to his crew, because when they came out (without the owner) at 8:30 in the morning--several days before the originally scheduled appointment because they allegedly had finished another job early, which I thought was in very bad form, since after all other people have jobs and schedules too--they went after the beautiful river birch's lower branches and had them removed in about three minutes. My partner rushed out and stopped them before they got any farther, and it's a good thing, because the tree has now lost its principle beauty. It's still a great tree, but it won't look like it did, with those lower branches sweeping the ground so gracefully, probably ever again. I spent all day yesterday crying over it. I have zero respect for people who can't communicate properly, and it looks to me like Eshleman's Tree Care has very poor skills in that regard. They also should not show up unannounced expecting to do work that is scheduled for another day. Oh, and they crushed a couple of hostas too. I have come to expect any kind of work crew to stomp all around my house and property like thugs, which seems to be the norm in Oklahoma, but I still don't like it and once it happens I am not likely to invite those same people back for other work. The crew did clean up the tree limbs properly. But in my opinion they work too fast, and obviously the conversations leading up to the work were not correctly handled. My partner is somewhat to blame for ever using the dreaded phrase "raise the canopy" in the first place, but that was in the very first communication. It seems to me that a real professional in this line of work would make very, very sure that the instructions were all double-checked with everyone, since people can get very attached to trees, and the business owner himself remarked on what a nice tree that river birch is. One other thing: my partner emailed Eshleman's Tree Care last night to express in brief and polite terms our disappointment that apparently the crew was not told to leave the lower limbs on the tree, and no one replied. That's pretty disappointing too.
