Bush Trimming, Pruning, and Removal

Trees and Shrubs, Same Crew, Same Visit

Most companies pick a lane. Tree companies leave the shrubs for someone else, and landscapers will not touch anything with real height. We do both, and that is usually the whole reason people call us.

If we are already on your property taking down a tree, the overgrown yews against the foundation and the arborvitae swallowing the fence line are a few more minutes of work, not a second appointment with a second company. One estimate, one crew, one cleanup, one bill.

It also means the person quoting your shrubs actually knows trees. A row of arborvitae that has gotten away from you is closer to tree work than to mowing, and cutting it back wrong is how you end up with brown holes that never fill in.

Hedges and Privacy Screens

Hedges are the ones people put off the longest, and they are the ones that punish waiting.

Arborvitae, privet, and boxwood hedges get planted as a four foot privacy screen and end up twelve feet tall and leaning into the neighbor's yard. Once they get that far, you cannot just take them back to where they started in one cut. Evergreens like arborvitae and yew will not push new growth from bare wood, so cutting into the brown interior leaves a hole that stays a hole.

What we do instead is bring a hedge back over a season or two, taking the height and width down in stages so it stays green the whole way. If a hedge is genuinely too far gone, we will tell you that at the estimate rather than take your money and hand you a row of sticks.

What We Trim Around the Lehigh Valley

Older homes in Allentown, Bethlehem, and the surrounding towns tend to have the same plantings, and each one wants something different.

• Arborvitae and privet. Privacy screens and property line hedges. Shaped so light reaches the bottom, otherwise they thin out from the ground up.
• Boxwood, yew, and holly. The foundation plantings on half the houses in Bethlehem. These take shaping well and can be held at a size for years.
• Forsythia, lilac, and hydrangea. Flowering shrubs where timing decides whether you get blooms next spring. Cut at the wrong point in the year and you remove next season's flowers.
• Burning bush and rose of sharon. Fast growers that need real cutting back, not a light trim.
• Overgrown foundation beds. Shrubs grown up over the windows or pressed against the siding, where the trapped moisture starts causing problems for the house itself.

Trimming It Back or Taking It Out

Not every overgrown shrub is worth saving, and we will give you a straight answer on which is which.

Worth cutting back: the plant is healthy, it is the right plant for the spot, and it has simply gotten ahead of you. Most boxwood, yew, holly, and flowering shrubs fall here. A hard prune and a maintenance schedule solves it.

Worth removing: it is dead or half dead, it is planted somewhere it was never going to fit, it is blocking a window or a walkway permanently, or it is a row of arborvitae so far gone that bringing it back would take longer than replanting.

When we remove a shrub, the root ball comes out too. Leaving a stump in a bed means it either resprouts or sits there rotting where you wanted to plant something. We take it out, backfill the hole, and haul the debris off with everything else.