Tree Trimming in Pawnee

Pawnee is a small town about 20 miles south of Springfield surrounded by agricultural land, with a compact older residential core and a few newer streets on the edges. The town has a mix of older homes from the early 1900s with large established trees and some mid-century housing. It serves as a local hub for the farming communities in southern Sangamon County. Tree work here tends to be less frequent, and when it happens the trees are often significantly overgrown.

Overgrown or dead branches drop fast during the ice storms that hit central Illinois every winter. Springfield sits in a wide-open prairie with no natural windbreak, so trees here take the full force of those storms. A lot of the older neighborhoods like Iles Park and Laurel Hills have silver maples and cottonwoods that were planted in the 1960s and are now pushing 60 feet tall — those limbs get heavy, and heavy limbs fall.

We look at the tree in person before we quote anything, because a photo doesn't show a hollow trunk or a root system heaving up against a foundation. We cut to the branch collar — that's the slight ridge where the branch meets the trunk — so the tree seals itself over instead of rotting from an open wound left by a flush cut.