Paris Tree Service
Paris, Ontario · County of Brant
Paris Tree Service does tree trimming on the trees around houses in Paris and the corner of the County of Brant that surrounds it. Some people ring us about one dead limb hanging over a garage. Others ring because a whole tree has come down across the drive at six in the morning. We are fully insured, our arborists do the climbing themselves, and every tree trimming job starts the same way: somebody stands under the tree and looks up.
A tree is not a hedge. Cut it in the wrong place and it does not simply grow back — it answers with a burst of weak upright shoots off the wound, and in five years you are paying to take those down too. Good tree trimming means cutting back to a growing point the tree can seal over, and leaving the branch collar alone.
Tree trimming, pruning, dead branch removal, storm damage, full tree removal, crown thinning, cabling and stump grinding are all on the list. Ring (226) 546-3814 and we will get somebody out to look at it.
Say which tree and what is underneath it. Somebody comes out, walks the property and sends a written scope back. Or call (226) 546-3814.
The person who prices the tree trimming is the person who climbs it. Nobody quotes off a photograph, and nobody sends a crew to a tree they have never seen.
Our tree trimming cuts back to a lateral or to the collar, and we do not top trees. Topping is still sold around here as a way of making a tall tree safe, and it does the opposite: it strips the crown, forces out a mass of poorly attached regrowth, and leaves large wounds that decay inward for years. A tree that has been topped once needs work forever.
We are fully insured for tree trimming and tree removal, and we will show you the paperwork before anybody puts a rope in your tree. Ask the same question of whoever else has quoted you. Tree work is one of the few trades where an uninsured accident on your property can become your problem.
Everything goes in writing before we start: which trees, which limbs, how much comes off, what happens to the brush and the wood, and what is not in the price. Hold the finished job up against that sheet afterwards and check it line by line. Our about page sets out how the crew works and what we own.
Where a tree does not need the tree trimming somebody has told you it needs, we say so. That happens often enough in this town to be worth writing on a web page.
Seven tree trimming services, and the reason trees around Paris tend to need each one.
Tree trimming and pruning is most of what we do in Paris, and most tree trimming is not about making a tree smaller. It is about taking weight off the wrong places, getting the dead material out, and cutting so the tree can seal what we cut.
View Tree Trimming and Pruning
Dead branch removal is the tree trimming job people put off longest, and the one that gives least warning. A dead limb does not creak, lean or drop leaves to tell you it is going. It stays exactly where it is until the day it does not, which is why dead branch removal gets booked after the fact rather than before.
View Dead Branch Removal
Emergency storm damage cleanup is the call that comes at five in the morning, and it is the one part of tree trimming nobody plans for. A tree across the drive, a limb through the garage roof, a trunk resting on the car, or a branch left hanging over the front door with nothing holding it. Storm damage cleanup is answered outside working hours.
View Emergency Storm Damage Cleanup
Tree removal is the last option on the list, not the first, and we would rather talk you out of a tree removal than sell you one you did not need. But a dead, split, badly leaning or structurally finished tree beside a house is past what tree trimming can fix, and pretending otherwise costs more in the end.
View Tree Removal
Crown thinning and canopy reduction are the two kinds of tree trimming that make a large tree less of a liability without taking it out. Thinning takes density out of the crown; canopy reduction takes size off the outside of it. They solve different problems, they are constantly confused, and neither one is topping.
View Crown Thinning and Canopy Reduction
Tree cabling and bracing is how you keep a structurally suspect tree that is otherwise healthy and worth keeping, once tree trimming alone will not do it. A cable is a flexible support fitted high in the crown between two limbs or two stems; a brace is a rigid rod through a union that is already moving. Cabling and bracing limits movement, it does not repair the union.
View Tree Cabling and Bracing
Stump grinding and removal is the tree trimming job that turns a felled tree back into usable garden. A grinder takes the stump down below ground level in chips, so the area can be levelled, turfed, planted or paved. Stump grinding is quoted separately from taking the tree down.
View Stump Grinding and RemovalTree trimming takes weight off the ends of the limbs, where it does the most damage in a wind. A long limb loaded with leaf acts as a lever on its own union, and the union is where trees fail.
Deadwood comes out before it drops on its own schedule. That is the part of tree trimming that actually keeps people safe, because a dead branch does not announce itself — it lets go on a still afternoon as often as in a storm.
Light and air get back into the crown and down to whatever is growing underneath, which is the reason half of all tree trimming gets booked. Most lawns that will not thrive under a maple are short of light, not fertiliser.
Clearance is restored over the roof, the drive and the road. That is the difference between a tree that scrubs your shingles every winter and one that does not, and it is the most visible thing tree trimming does.
Faults get found early. Half of what regular tree trimming is worth is that somebody with a rope and a headlamp is up there once every few years, seeing the split you cannot see from the lawn. No amount of tree trimming from the ground finds that.
Half an hour on the property settles what a photograph never will. Neither the visit nor the written quote costs anything.
Paris sits on a hilly stretch the early surveyors called the Oak Plains, at the point where the Nith runs into the Grand. It is old river-laid sand and gravel, and it drains fast.
That ground grows very good oaks, and it grows the kind of trees that need tree trimming most: wide crowns on shallow root plates. A tree on this soil puts its roots out sideways in the top few feet rather than down, because down is dry gravel. In a normal year you never notice. In a wet autumn followed by a hard blow, a big crown on a shallow plate is what lifts, and you get the whole tree over with the root ball still attached rather than a snapped trunk.
Tree trimming is the cheap end of managing that. Take a share of the sail area out of a broad crown and the same wind puts far less leverage on the roots. What tree trimming does not do is make a tree bulletproof, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Emerald ash borer reached the Grand River watershed in 2010 and it is everywhere in it now. The conservation authority alone has taken down more than sixteen thousand ash across its own properties over the past decade, at a cost running to about three million dollars. What is left standing on private lots is the backlog.
A dead ash is not like other dead trees, and ordinary tree trimming does not apply to it. Ash dries out and goes brittle fast once the borer has cut off its water, and it fails at the branch unions rather than snapping where you would expect. That makes it dangerous to climb and dangerous to rig off, because climbing and rigging both load the tree in exactly the way it can no longer take.
So a dead ash is a bucket or a crane job, or it comes down from the ground. It costs more than the same-sized maple would, and it is the one case where tree trimming is not an option at all. If you have an ash on your lot that has been standing dead for two or three seasons, it is not getting cheaper to deal with. It is getting harder.
The first question in any tree trimming quote is never how tall the tree is. It is what is underneath it.
A sixty-foot maple in the middle of an open lawn can be dropped in one piece in an hour. The same tree three feet off a conservatory, with a hydro service running through it and a neighbour's fence on the other side, comes down in forty pieces on ropes and takes most of a day. Same tree, same height, and a tree trimming quote several times apart.
For rough orientation, tree removal in this province tends to run a few hundred dollars for something small and open, and well into four figures once a tree is large, dead, or awkwardly placed. Trimming a single tree usually lands somewhere between those extremes. Stump grinding is priced separately, and emergency work after a storm costs more than the same job booked in advance because it is done at short notice and often at night.
Those are market ranges for the province, not our quote. The only tree trimming figure that means anything is the one somebody writes down after standing on your lawn.
The low ground along the Grand and the Nith is silver maple country, and silver maple is a tree with a specific habit of failure.
It grows fast, it grows large, and it very often grows two or three trunks that split from the same point low down, which is what makes tree trimming on it worth doing early. Where those stems press together as they thicken, the bark gets rolled into the union instead of the wood knitting across it. That is an included union, and it is a crack waiting for a wet snow to finish.
Silver maples are worth keeping. They are the shade over half the older gardens in this town. They are also the trees that most reward regular tree trimming, because a weak union found at fifteen years is a cabling job and the same union found at forty is a tree removal.
Southern Ontario gets ice, and ice is what actually brings trees down here — usually the ones nobody has had tree trimming done on. Snow slides off. Ice does not. It coats every twig and every branch and can multiply what the crown weighs several times over, silently, overnight.
When that happens the calls come in faster than any tree trimming crew can attend them. We take them in order of what is at risk, not in the order they arrive. A limb resting on a live service drop or lying across the only way out of a driveway goes ahead of a tree lying flat in the middle of a lawn, whoever rang first.
If a branch is touching a wire, do not go near it and do not let anybody else. Ring the hydro utility first and us second. We do not cut trees off live conductors and neither should anyone else without the utility present.
A tree trimming quote should name the trees, not the property. "Trim rear maple" is not a scope; "reduce the two lowest limbs on the rear silver maple by about eight feet back to laterals, remove deadwood over 50mm through the crown" is.
It should say what happens to the brush and the wood. Chipped and taken, cut to firewood length and stacked, or left where it falls are three different tree trimming jobs at three different prices, and the difference is not small.
It should say who is insured for what. Get that in writing from every tree trimming company that quotes you, including us.
It should say what is excluded. Stump grinding, fence panels that have to come out for access, and hauling the trunk wood away are the three that most often turn into a second invoice on somebody else's quote.
The streets in the older part of Paris were laid out around cobblestone and brick houses long before anybody planned for a chipper truck. The lots are narrow, the houses sit close, and the trees on them have had a century and a half to get large. Tree trimming there is a different job from tree trimming on a new estate.
Almost nothing in that part of town can be felled. It comes down in sections on rigging line, lowered rather than dropped, and often over a roof or a garden wall that has to be protected first. That is slow work, and it is what a tree trimming crew is actually for.
It also means access decides a lot. Where a truck can park, and whether there is a gate wide enough to get a chipper into the back garden, changes a tree trimming day more than the tree does. Tell us about that when you ring.
Not every tree is a tree trimming job, and pretending otherwise is how people end up paying twice.
A tree with a large decay pocket at the base, a significant new lean with cracked soil lifting on one side, or a crown that has been thinning from the top down for several seasons is telling you something that pruning does not fix. So is a stem that has already split.
At that point the honest conversation is no longer about tree trimming. It is about tree removal, and about what goes back in its place. The County bought about a hundred acres at Barker's Bush in 2019 to keep that piece of Carolinian woodland standing, and the same instinct is right in a garden: take out what has to go, and plant something that will still be there in eighty years.
We do not top trees. Topping is not tree trimming, and we will not do it if you ask us to.
We do not cut trees off live hydro conductors. That is utility work and the utility has to be there.
We do not quote a tree we have not seen, and we do not price tree trimming off a photograph sent by text. You would not accept that from a roofer.
We do not clear woodland without checking what the County allows first. The County of Brant regulates tree cutting in woodlands under its own by-laws, and while a single tree in a garden is a different matter, a bush lot is not something to start cutting on a hunch. If your job is anywhere near that line we will tell you to ring the County before we book anything in. The contact page has everything you need to reach us.
Somebody attends and walks the whole property, not just the tree you rang about. Tree trimming faults come in groups, and the tree you have not noticed is usually the one worth talking about.
We look at the target as much as the tree. What is underneath it decides how much of it can simply be dropped and how much has to be roped down in pieces, and that decides the price more than height does.
You get a written tree trimming scope: the trees, the work on each, how the debris leaves the site, and the figure. Nothing is owed for the visit or the quote.
On the day, the site gets set up first — cones, ropes, and anything breakable moved. Then the climb, then the tree trimming itself, working from the top down.
Brush goes through the chipper, wood is cut to length and stacked or taken away, and the ground gets raked and blown before anybody leaves. A tree trimming job should leave a lawn looking like nobody was there.
Climbing, rigging and cleanup on trees around Paris and the County of Brant.
Paris itself is the bulk of our tree trimming work — the old town core on both sides of the Grand, the streets climbing away from the river, and the newer subdivisions on the flat ground above.
Beyond the town our tree trimming covers Paris Plains, Glen Morris, Harrisburg, Bethel and Falkland, out to Princeton and Drumbo in the west, north to Ayr, and south into Brantford.
If you are right on the edge of that, ring and ask instead of guessing. Distance is rarely what decides whether we take a tree trimming job. How much work there is, and how soon you need it, usually matter more.
Ring (226) 546-3814 or use the form. We walk the property, name every tree and every cut, and put one price on paper.
For most trees, late winter is the best window. The leaves are off so the structure is visible, the ground is often frozen enough to keep heavy equipment off the lawn, and the tree seals its wounds quickly once it starts moving in spring. Oaks are the exception worth knowing about: avoid pruning them in spring and early summer, when fresh cuts attract the beetles that spread oak wilt. Dead branch removal and anything unsafe is done whenever we find it, in any season.
For one tree in a garden in Paris, usually not. The County of Brant's tree by-laws are aimed at woodlands rather than single yard trees. Where it stops being simple is a bush lot, a stand of trees, or anything near a watercourse or a development, and that is where you should ring the County before anybody starts cutting. We will tell you plainly if we think your job sits near that line.
It depends on what is under the tree far more than on how tall it is. An open lawn with room to drop the whole thing is the cheap end. A large or dead tree over a house, a fence and a hydro service that has to come down in sections on ropes is the expensive end, and dead ash is dearer again because it cannot safely be climbed. The visit and the written quote cost nothing, so the useful answer is the one you get on the day.
Whatever you want. Brush goes through the chipper as standard. Trunk wood can be cut to firewood length and stacked, taken away entirely, or left long if you have a use for it — those are three different prices and they are itemised separately, so nothing turns up as a surprise afterwards.
Usually, yes, and we do a lot of tree trimming that way. It is slower, because everything comes out through the house side or over a fence by hand, and that shows in the price. Tell us about the access when you ring — gate width, whether there are steps, and where a truck can stand. It changes the day more than most people expect.
The more you can tell us about the tree and the access, the more the first visit achieves. Only a way of reaching you is required. Would you sooner speak to someone? The number is (226) 546-3814.
