Many things arboriculture, professionals will argue, should start with an objective. Cultural practices like pruning, cabling and bracing, installation and landscape design, and integrated pest management are utilitarian practices. They should serve a purpose, create less maintenance, hold a fair price and produce effective results. So then the objective is first and foremost, economy. Aesthetics, in the utilitarian approach to tree care, is then a by-product of economy.

I feel as though control is at the heart of arboricultural practices, and seems to dominate many cultural objectives. Tree owners don’t want a tree next to the house too big, they don’t want birds pooping on their car, or leaves in their gutter, or dead limbs in their yard. Maintenance-free is an attractive attribute to any design, to any species. There are products like growth regulators, root barriers, and soil surfactants. All of which give the user some degree of control over a tree’s biological processes. To control is to care, we suspect. The objective for many mechanical cultural practices is to control for size, for health and for safety, maintain vigor and minimize decay. During a removal where rigging helps us to achieve objectives, we want to have total control of the physical process of snatching and rigging down wood and brush. To demonstrate control is an attribute of mastery specific to the medium of arboriculture.

“I want you to take as much off as you can without killing it,” says the thrifty tree owner with a sideways smirk.

The objective of control, in residential tree care, becomes a tight-rope walk between people and trees, a tug of war between the economy of people and the natural aesthetics and biological processes of woody plants, not to mention a battle with our inner conscious to do what’s right and concurrent with standard practice. There is a give and a take between tree needs and client needs, so the story I’m sure has gone for many hundreds of years. The issue of poor design or good design also plays a critical role in tree maintenance. The wrong tree in the wrong place could intensify the maintenance schedule or other cultural demands, but it could also make the story more interesting. A special tree typically has a special story, and sometimes special needs. The objective for any type of special connection like this is control in the form of nurturing and urgent care. Micromanaging. Of which there are so many options. Options are the by-product of arborists just like aesthetics are the by-products of economy.

As an arborist, it is rare that I consider my setting an urban forest, or a stand of trees, or more universally, an ecosystem. That natural world seems far off, even after I rattle off the ecological benefits of trees in the urban environment on a sales call. More often than not I’m over a frozen, vinyl fence or a sunroom, on a broken lead hung up near the garage, getting scolded by a neighbor or getting ridiculed for a tree not looking any damn different after dodging dog shit for four hours. My setting as an arborist seems more often than not to be where the natural and unnatural world meet, that sliver of the universe where tree work happens. A fantasy land of neighbor disputes and lifted sidewalk pads and while-you-are-here requests. In someones yard. Next to a parking lot. Alongside a busy road. Where a biotic economy is driven by abiotic demands. To walk this line takes a fair share of focus and creativity, and the ability to blend the simple and the spectacular, so that no one knows the difference.

E.B. White wrote “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it difficult to plan the day,” (Grant, 242). If ever a quote resonated with the objective of good tree care it is this one. I think many times we get to experience both sides of White’s notion, for both improving the world and enjoying the world. Because the trees we care for improve the world, and maybe our companies and services improve someone’s life, or someone’s community; standing on the edge of a forest or on the tip of a limb we can enjoy the world by enjoying the web of life we are a part of.

That’s the objective.