Organized by what you can see rather than by what it is called. Find the symptom, and the page tells you what it usually means here, how urgent it is, and whether it is treatable.
Bare lower branches, thinning a whorl higher each year, purple-brown needles on the ground underneath.
Leaf tissue the color of weak lemonade, the vein network still dark green through it.
A clean D-shaped hole an eighth of an inch across, flat on one side and curved on the other.
Sky through the top of a tree that used to be solid, bare twigs above and green leaves below.
Olive-black blotches in June, yellow leaves in early July, a tree half naked by the time the sweet corn is in.
A glaze on the windshield every morning, a patio that pulls at your shoes, black film over the leaves and furniture below.
A gray-white film on the leaf surface in August, thickest on the shaded side and worst near a fence.
New shoots turn black, bend into a hook, and the dead leaves hang on the twig instead of falling.
One limb goes limp and brown while every other limb holds its leaves.
A branch high in the crown yellows and wilts in June while the rest of the elm is green.
New candles that browned before they finished growing, dead shoots starting low in the tree and moving a little higher every season.
Brown, brittle edges with green tissue still holding in the middle.
Not seeing yours? Send a photo of the tree and one of the damage.
Where on the tree it started
Bottom-up on an evergreen, top-down on a shade tree and inside-out on a canopy are three unrelated families of problem.
Whether it is one branch or all of them
A single limb is usually mechanical, root or vascular. A pattern across the whole tree is pest, disease or site.
What the species is
Half of the calls to this office are already narrowed by the answer. Ash, spruce and crabapple each have a short list.
What the neighbors have
Most of what we treat moves through a street rather than through one yard, so the block is part of the diagnosis.
Naming it in the first season
Free to ask
The diagnosis costs nothing. Most of what gets caught this early is treatable, and a fair amount of it turns out to need nothing at all.
Acting in the second or third season
Treatable, slower
Still worth doing on most species, but the tree carries visible damage for years while it grows past what it lost.
Waiting until it is a safety question
$1,000 – $8,000
Removal, the stump, and twenty years before a replacement does what the old tree did. Every diagnosis on this page is measured against this bar.
Removal figures are Eden's published range and vary with size, access and what is underneath the tree.
Leaves and needles
Bark, limbs and trunk
Changing color
Changing color / Leaves and needles
Yellow between green veins, brown crisp margins, white powder, spotted leaves.
Almost always a deficiency, a water problem or a leaf fungus. Rarely fatal, usually treatable, and worth naming before anything is applied.
Changing color / Bark, limbs and trunk
White resin streaks, dark weeping patches, sunken areas on the trunk.
Canker, sunscald or mechanical injury. This is where a written risk assessment starts earning its cost.
Dying or falling
Dying or falling / Leaves and needles
A spruce going bare bottom-up, a crabapple defoliating in July, pine candles dying.
Usually fungal and usually on a spring spray window that has to be hit within weeks. Timing decides whether it works.
Dying or falling / Bark, limbs and trunk
D-shaped exit holes, fine sawdust at the base, whole limbs wilting overnight.
Borers or a vascular disease. This is the group where waiting a season genuinely changes the outcome, and where most removals begin.
Marked cells are the two groups where waiting a season genuinely changes the outcome.
“We have always used Eden Tree Pros for all of our tree trimming needs, and for iron treatments for our birch tree. We won't use anyone else. They have earned our trust.”
These twelve are the ones we are asked about most, not the only things we treat. Send a photo of the whole tree and a close one of the damage to 402-332-2839 or through the estimate form, and an arborist will tell you what it is.
No. An experienced arborist comes out, walks the tree with you and gives you the answer in writing. If the tree needs nothing, that is what the answer says, and it is still free.
Often, and it saves everybody a trip. Two pictures usually do it: the whole tree from far enough back to see the pattern, and a close one of a leaf or the bark. Where a photo is genuinely not enough, we say so rather than guess.
It depends entirely which of these it is. A crabapple dropping leaves in July can wait until next spring with no consequence. An ash with exit holes and a thinning crown cannot. The page for your symptom says which kind it is.
Most of the time, no. The great majority of what comes through this office is either cosmetic or treatable, and a surprising share of it needs nothing at all. The pages here are written to tell you which category you are in rather than to make every symptom sound like an emergency.
Usually, though the diagnosis is not conditional on it. We will tell you a problem is not worth treating, or belongs to somebody else, or is a watering habit rather than a disease, and none of those conversations comes with an invoice.
Because a tree has a small vocabulary. Yellow leaves, thin canopy and dead branch tips are how it reports drought, compaction, root damage, deficiency, insects and half a dozen diseases. Narrowing which one is most of the work, and it is why a spray applied without a diagnosis so often does nothing.
No. Estimates and diagnoses are free everywhere on our route, which is twenty-six towns across the Omaha metro and into western Iowa.
Diagnosis is free, including when the answer is that the tree needs nothing.
The treatment side: diagnosis, injection, feeding and the annual program.
The six treatments most of these problems end up needing.
When the problem has become a question about what is underneath the tree.
An hour of somebody's expertise on your property with no job attached.
Some of what looks like disease is structure, and pruning is the answer.
For the honest cases where the answer is replacement and species choice matters.
A tree has a very small vocabulary for telling you something is wrong. Leaves go yellow, the canopy thins, branches die back at the tips. Those three signals cover drought, compaction, root severance, iron deficiency, half a dozen fungal diseases and several insects, which is why so many people spend money on the wrong treatment and conclude that treatment does not work.
The narrowing is almost never about a laboratory. It is about pattern. Where on the tree did it start, is it one limb or all of them, what species is it, what is the soil like, what did the neighbors' trees do, and what happened on that ground in the last five years. A construction trench cut through a root zone in 2021 produces a canopy that starts thinning in 2024, and no amount of looking at the leaves will find that.
That is the reason every page in this section is organized around what a homeowner can actually see rather than around what the pathogen is called. Nobody walks outside and observes a fungal infection. They see a spruce going bare from the bottom, or sticky spots on the car, and the useful question is what that pattern usually means in this metro and how urgent it is. Ask us to name yours — 402-332-2839 — and the answer is free, including when it is that nothing needs doing.
