Omaha is where the old trees are. Dundee, Benson, Field Club, Aksarben — a century of canopy over narrow lots and buried utilities — and it is also where the emerald ash borer has done its worst work in Nebraska.
The old neighborhoods
Dundee, Benson, Field Club and Aksarben carry some of the oldest residential canopy in the state — bur oaks and elms that predate the houses under them. Work here is rigging work: big wood lowered in pieces over roofs, fences and the neighbor's garden, because there is nowhere to drop anything.
The ash streets
Omaha planted ash by the block for decades, which made it the densest ash population in the metro and the hardest hit. The city has lost more than nine thousand ash trees to the emerald ash borer, and the private losses run alongside the public ones. Every untreated ash in Omaha is now a decision waiting to be made.
West Omaha
West of about 168th the story flips: young trees on compacted, high-pH clay, planted fast during construction. Out here the work is chlorosis correction, structure pruning and depth fixes.
An arborist can usually be in Omaha within the week. Storm calls are same day.
The ash decision
Treat or remove. We give a straight answer per tree — treatment is real and it works, but not every ash is worth the ongoing cost, and we will say which is which.
Old oaks and elms over houses
Midtown's giants need weight reduction, deadwood removal and sometimes cables — careful work, because a hundred-year-old bur oak does not get a second chance.
Storm damage in tight quarters
When wind comes through the old neighborhoods, limbs land on structures. Getting them off without making it worse is a crane-and-rigging problem, not a chainsaw problem.
Yellow maples out west
Iron chlorosis on the newer streets, driven by the same graded clay as everywhere else in the metro. Injection fixes it.
Trunk injection protects a healthy ash for years per treatment. The page explains who should and should not buy it.
From dead ash on a boulevard lot to a bur oak over the house. Written price, $1,000 – $8,000 range, before anything is booked.
Weight reduction and deadwood on the old canopy; structure on the young. Different jobs, same crew.
For the split-prone unions midtown's silver maples and elms grew decades ago.
A written, honest read on the tree you are not sure about — before the storm, not after.
For the chlorotic maples and pin oaks west Omaha's clay produces on schedule.
~25 min
From the Gretna shop
Midtown Omaha is about twenty-five minutes from S 220th; the west side is closer than that.
9,000+
Omaha ash trees lost
The scale of the EAB losses so far — and the reason we treat the treatable ones and say so when a tree is not.
1997
Family owned since
Nearly three decades working this metro's trees, most of them Omaha's.
26
Towns served
Omaha is the biggest of them, and most of the crew's week is spent inside it.
“DJ was great, cleaned up our birch tree as we requested and found some additional storm damage. Tree looks great.”
If it still has most of its canopy, usually not. Trunk injection protects a healthy or lightly infested ash for years at a time, and it costs far less per year than removal costs once. Past roughly half canopy loss, the honest answer is removal, and we will tell you which side of that line your tree is on.
Yes — that is exactly the work we staff and rig for. Old-neighborhood Omaha means big wood over houses, narrow side yards and no drop zone, so everything comes down in controlled pieces. It is slower and more deliberate than open-lot work, and it should be.
Iron chlorosis. The newer subdivisions sit on graded, high-pH clay that locks up iron, and maples, birches and pin oaks show it first — yellow leaves, dark green veins. It is treatable by injection and worth treating early.
Yes, including hangers over structures and trees on roofs. Anything touching a house or blocking access gets priority, and in a widespread storm we work a triage list rather than a first-call-first-served one.
For a tree in your own yard, generally no. Trees in the public right-of-way — the strip between sidewalk and street — are a different matter and involve the city. If your tree is on that line, we will tell you before quoting, not after cutting.
Free and written. An arborist looks at the tree in person, tells you what it needs — which is sometimes nothing — and you get a firm number, not a range that grows on invoice day.
Estimates are free everywhere on the route, and the drive is never on the invoice.
Every tree in Omaha is somebody's decision, made decades ago: the bur oaks somebody spared when Dundee was platted, the elms that survived Dutch elm disease because somebody treated them, the ash planted by the thousands because it was cheap and fast. The city has lost more than nine thousand ash trees to the borer, and the ash still standing are the decision this decade hands to homeowners.
We would rather you make that decision with real information. Treatment works; we inject ash every season and they stay green while the untreated ones on the same block come down. But treatment is a commitment, not a cure, and a tree that is already badly infested or poorly placed is not worth committing to. An estimate from us includes that judgment call in writing, even when it costs us the removal.
The rest of Omaha's work we love for its variety: preservation pruning on canopy older than the company, cables in silver maples, chlorosis injections out west, and young-tree structure work in subdivisions that will be the Dundees of 2100 if somebody prunes them right now. The crew drives in from Gretna — close enough that a storm call gets a same-day truck.
