The four operations, and which one you actually need
- Crown reduction — the overall height and spread come in, typically by 15–30%, each cut made back to a suitable lateral branch that can take over as the new leader. Right for a tree that has outgrown its space or is catching too much wind.
- Crown thinning — a percentage of the secondary branches are removed evenly throughout, letting light and wind through without changing the tree’s outline. Right for a dense canopy shading a lawn.
- Crown lifting — the lowest branches come off to give clearance over a path, drive or road. The cheapest of the four and often all a customer really wanted.
- Deadwooding — dead, dying, diseased and crossing limbs removed. Pure risk reduction, no change to the living crown.
Why we will not top your tree
Topping — cutting the crown back to stubs with no regard for growth points — is the single most damaging thing you can do to a mature tree, and it is still routinely sold in this county by people with a chainsaw and a van.
The tree responds to the shock by throwing out dense epicormic regrowth from dormant buds under the bark. That regrowth is weakly attached, grows faster than the original branch structure, and within five to seven years you have a taller, denser, structurally worse tree and a second bill. Meanwhile the large flat cuts cannot compartmentalise, so decay walks straight down into the trunk.
BS3998:2010 exists precisely to stop this. Every cut we make is back to a lateral of at least a third the diameter of the limb removed, sized so the tree can seal it. It costs the same on the day and saves you the second job.
How much can safely come off
As a rule of thumb, no more than about 30% of the live crown in a single operation on a healthy, vigorous tree — and considerably less on a mature or stressed one. A veteran oak may tolerate 10%. Take too much and the tree loses the photosynthetic capacity to fund its own defence, which is how a "tidy up" turns into a dying tree three summers later.
If someone has quoted you "take it back by half", they are quoting a topping job with a nicer name on it.
Timing
Most broadleaves are best pruned in late winter while dormant. There are real exceptions worth knowing: prune plum, cherry and other Prunus species in mid-summer to avoid silver leaf and bacterial canker; do not prune birch, maple or walnut in late winter unless you like sap bleeding; and oak should be avoided between April and June where oak wilt or, more relevantly here, where the tree is already stressed.
Formative pruning on young trees is the cheapest arboriculture there is. Twenty minutes on a five-year-old tree prevents the £700 crown reduction at twenty-five years.
High hedges and boundary trees
You have a legal right to cut branches overhanging your boundary back to the property line — but only to the line, and the arisings legally belong to the tree owner, so you must offer them back. Cutting beyond the boundary is trespass, and cutting a protected tree is still an offence even where the branch is over your garden.
If the problem is a run of evergreens over two metres, that is a Part 8 high hedge complaint to the district council rather than a tree job. We will tell you if that is what you are actually dealing with.