The Tree Guy

The Tree Guy provides tree service in the St. George area, palms included. Palms are everywhere in this valley and they are not trees in the sense the rest of the trade means, which changes almost everything about how they are maintained.

Context

A palm is a monocot. It has no vascular cambium and therefore no secondary growth, which means it does not add rings, does not thicken with age and cannot grow over a wound. Every cut, scrape and spike hole in a palm trunk is permanent - it stays exactly as it was made for the life of the plant, and it remains an open door for rot and insects. That is why climbing spikes, standard practice on a removal, are unacceptable on a palm that is being kept. It also means a palm has no branches to prune for structure: all its growth comes from a single terminal bud at the top, and damaging that bud kills the palm outright with no possibility of recovery.

The common mistake is over-trimming. Cutting fronds back to a narrow upright tuft - the look sometimes called a hurricane cut - removes the food-producing tissue the palm depends on and, in the desert, removes the shade those fronds cast on the growing point. A palm treated that way grows a narrower trunk at that height, and the constriction is permanent and visible for decades. Standard practice is to remove only fully dead fronds and to leave green ones in place. Fronds and dead skirts are worth removing for fire safety near a building, but the reason is fuel rather than appearance, and the palm gains nothing from losing living tissue.

Worth reading alongside this: Town Square Park and garden centers. See every listing under Tree Service.