Here in the UK in general and London in particular, we’ve been in love with gardens for centuries. You just have to look at our poetry and other literature to see that we’re fascinated with gardens. We’re also fascinated with the trees that form such a dominant part of the gardens. You might like to blame it on the Druids and their fascination with species like oak, ash and rowan (you could say that ceremonially removing mistletoe from an oak counts as a type of oak tree surgery). Anyway, we love our gardens.

Most of the team here at Primus Tree Surgeons got our start helping our mums, dads and grandparents in the garden when we were kids, and we decided to make a career out of garden clearance work. However, although there are a ton of other garden care services out there that will mow your lawn and pull your weeds, there aren’t too many that specialise in tree care services. This is why we decided to put Primus Tree Surgeons together: people needed help with trees in the garden that they couldn’t get from your average lawnmowing person, so we stepped in to fill that need.

Today, we’ve grown into a busy and thriving tree care company providing first-class tree care services and tree surgery throughout the Greater London Metropolitan Area. We are a team of highly trained and qualified tree surgeons, and we carry out all types of tree services for private individuals and commercial operations – including sports clubs, schools, churches and businesses. We take on small jobs (the fine touch needed for hedge trimming, bay tree surgery and wisteria surgery), medium-sized jobs (crown thinning and fruit tree care such as fig tree surgery and pear tree surgery) through to big jobs (tree removal, tree felling and stump grinding).

What is the Difference Between Tree Surgeons and Arborists?

The team members of Primus Tree Surgeons will refer to themselves as tree surgeons rather than arborists. You might be scratching your head a bit, wondering what the difference between the two is. Well, although most (if not all) tree surgeons are arborists, not all arborists are tree surgeons.

Arboriculture involves knowledge about how trees grow and respond to different management practices (and vines such as wisteria and ivy, as well as hedging plants are included in what an arborist knows). An arborist will know which branches on a tree are most likely to become stressed and damaged in strong winds, what will happen if you prune particular branches, whether or not a particular specimen is healthy or not, and whether your tree is suffering attack from a pest of some kind. An arborist is the sort of person who can decide what needs to be done to a particular tree to overcome a particular person. However, that’s where the work of a pure arborist ends.

A tree surgeon, on the other hand, has the skills, tools and knowledge needed to carry out the operation. Although your arborist might look at a tree and say, “That double leader in the pine will put the whole tree under stress, and it could easily snap next big northwesterly gale that blows through,” or “If you cut those branches back, you’ll get extra growth over there and over there, and you’ll end up with a lopsided tree; instead, you need to prune those branches and those branches, then that branch but leave that one.” The tree surgeon, on the other hand, will get out the polesaw, the loppers, the chainsaw and all the safety gear and actually do the tree pruning or crown reduction or whatever’s needed.

Of course, an experienced tree surgeon, who you’ll get with Primus Tree Surgeons, will have a fair bit of arboriculture tucked away in his or her skill set. Nowhere is this more apparent than when you need crown thinning or tree reduction. Say you’ve got a silver birch that’s making too much of itself, so birch tree reduction is called for. A tree surgeon will apply both arboricultural knowledge to know what will happen if certain branches are cut back or lopped off completely, and will select the branches for trimming and pruning, leaving you with a smaller silver birch that still looks lovely and graceful but doesn’t threaten overhead power lines or cast too much of a shadow into your living room.

Our Tree Care Services

Primus Tree Surgeons specialises in all services related to trees and similar woody plants, such as hedges and shrubs – although trees are what we do best. You’ll find a full description of our services on the dedicated Services page and more detailed information about select services such as hedge trimming and stump grinding elsewhere on this site. However, in brief, we offer homes and businesses throughout the Greater London Metropolitan Area the following tree care services:

  • emergency tree work: clearing up downed branches and trees after storms, high winds and flood damage
  • tree pruning and cutting: removing unwanted branches and shaping trees so they grow the way you want them to
  • crown reduction and crown thinning: allowing you to keep a tree but not letting it make too much of itself so that it encroaches on buildings or casts too much shade
  • stump grinding and removal: freeing up space and removing all traces of an unwanted tree without the use of dangerous chemicals
  • tree pollarding: the most severe type of tree pruning, which can be done for a variety of reasons
  • tree removal: if you want that tree gone, we’ll remove it (which doesn’t always involve felling it, depending on the tree)
  • tree felling: cutting an unwanted, diseased or dead tree down safely and efficiently
  • hedge trimming: from neat little box hedges through to big cypress and yew hedges, we’ll stop them getting shaggy and out of control

If you’re interested in booking one of our specialists to do a spot of ash tree surgery, rowan surgery, or whatever you need at your home or business, please get in touch with us. We operate in all parts of Greater London, including areas such as Canary Wharf, Canning Town, Islington, Hampstead, Richmond, and Blackheath, to name a few. We’re also willing to go a little further afield to nearby areas, so definitely worth getting in touch to see if we cover your area.

How Much Does A Tree Surgeon Cost?

We’d like to give you a nice tidy answer. However, tree surgeon costs vary for the simple reason that each situation is unique. Some treecutting will need a lot of safety equipment and several people so that the job can be carried out without endangering buildings, traffic and people. At other times, nothing more than one hard-working bloke with a pair of loppers and some pruning paint is what you need. The size, species and location of the tree that needs surgery also factor in, as some jobs will require fiddly delicate handling, whereas others require a lot of brute force and chainsaw work. The garden clearance issue also plays a role in determining tree surgeon prices, as the cost of removing and disposing of branches may need to be included in the total price; however, if you want the logs as garden features or for firewood, then that influences the cost as well.

We’d like to work with you so we can help you enjoy your garden and the trees in it, so if you want to find out how much does a tree surgeon cost or how much to remove a tree, get in touch with us, explain the situation in detail and maybe send us a few pictures, then we can give you a more accurate quote (the more details we can get, the more accurate we can be). We’re also more than happy to answer any other questions.