Tree Trimming in Southern View

Southern View is a small incorporated village on the south side of Springfield, a working-class residential community with modest mid-century homes. It is surrounded by Springfield and sits near the industrial and commercial corridors along South Grand Avenue. The housing stock is older, and the trees planted alongside these homes in the 1950s through 1970s are now large and in varying condition. Southern View is a community where deferred tree maintenance is common due to the economics of the neighborhood.

Overgrown or dead branches drop fast during the ice storms that hit central Illinois every winter. Springfield sits in a wide-open prairie with no natural windbreak, so trees here take the full force of those storms. A lot of the older neighborhoods like Iles Park and Laurel Hills have silver maples and cottonwoods that were planted in the 1960s and are now pushing 60 feet tall — those limbs get heavy, and heavy limbs fall.

We look at the tree in person before we quote anything, because a photo doesn't show a hollow trunk or a root system heaving up against a foundation. We cut to the branch collar — that's the slight ridge where the branch meets the trunk — so the tree seals itself over instead of rotting from an open wound left by a flush cut.