Twenty years in the canopy
Bob Stoudt has over 20 years of experience working with trees and is happy to share what that is worth to a property owner in Berks County. None of this needs a ladder. All of it can be checked from your own lawn on a Saturday.
The top
Topping cuts every lead back to a stub. The tree answers with a crowd of fast, weakly attached shoots growing out of the wound, and in five to eight years you have a taller tree with worse attachment than the one you paid to make safe. If a crown is genuinely too big for its space, the work is a reduction back to live lateral branches, and if that cannot be done the honest answer is removal.
The leads
A co-dominant stem with bark trapped inside the union is one of the most common reasons a mature tree splits in a summer storm. It is visible from the ground once you know to look for it: two stems of roughly equal size, meeting at a narrow angle, often with a seam of dark bark running down into the join. Caught early it can be reduced or cabled. Caught after the split, it is a removal.
The crown
Deadwood over a driveway, a patio or a play area is the cheapest thing on any estimate and the one most worth doing. A crown clean takes the dead, hanging and crossing material out and nothing else. It does not change the shape of the tree and it removes almost everything that is likely to come down on its own.
The cut
A correct pruning cut sits just outside the collar, the swollen ring where a branch meets the trunk, and closes over as a neat doughnut of callus within a couple of seasons. A flush cut into the trunk takes the collar away and leaves a wound that never seals. A stub left long dies back and rots inward. You can read a tree's pruning history from the ground.
The season
Dormant pruning is easier to judge with the leaves off, the tree responds fast in spring, and the wound-borne diseases that matter here move less in cold weather. Oaks in particular are best pruned in the dormant season rather than in the middle of summer. Deadwood, hangers and anything actually dangerous are exceptions and get done whenever they are found.
The base
Two to three inches of mulch, spread wide and pulled back so it does not touch the trunk, keeps roots cool and holds water. Mulch piled against the bark keeps it permanently wet, invites rot at the root flare and encourages roots to circle up into the pile and strangle the tree. If you cannot see the flare where the trunk widens into the ground, there is too much on it.
The ground
Most of a mature tree's roots are in the top eighteen inches of soil and spread further than the branches do. New paving, a trench for a line, or a season of trucks parked over the root plate does damage that shows up two or three years later as thin, early-yellowing foliage in the top of the crown. If a tree started declining a couple of years after building work, that is usually why.
When it stops being a tip
None of these are emergencies in the sense of sirens. All of them are cheaper and safer to deal with before the next storm than after it.
More on what the work involves: tree care services and tree removal services.