Offering Tree and Plant Healthcare Services
Services
As professional arborists, Arbor Green Services takes exceptional care with your home or business—offering each customer superior service based on the latest scientific breakthroughs. We strive to use organic products and solutions to protect your trees, shrubs, and perennials, as well as your environment.
Our services include:
Professionalism on every front
Homeowners
Your home deserves the highest care and attention from a knowledgeable, professional company.
Commercial Properties
Rest assured that your place of business will be given the utmost care and consideration.
Homeowners’ Associations
We provide a comprehensive and professional approach to tree and plant health care for “common area”
Pests and Diseases
If not prevented, pests and diseases can quickly damage your landscape. By the time you observe plant damage, a serious infestation is present. We can treat pests with OMRI‑certified organic products that allow you to maintain an eco-friendly environment. Ask about our Plant Health Care preventative program.
Piercing, sucking pests that create sticky honeydew that can drip on cars, sidewalks, and cause leaves to drop prematurely after the sun burns them. Future pruning may be necessary because of leaf loss and dieback of the tree canopy. Aphids attract yellow jackets, bees, and ants, which love the sugary carbohydrate as their favorite food source. This food source helps the ants maintain their colony and presence.
Trees and plants effected: oak, maple, hackberry, tulip, birch, ash, elm, and roses.
California now has 20 invasive species of bark beetles, which attack both weak and healthy trees by boring into them. These beetles can kill large pines in as few as 30 days by girdling and vectoring a fungus into the tree. Bark beetle adults are small, cylindrical, hard-bodied insects about the size of a grain of rice. Most species are dark red, brown, or black. The most common species infesting pines are the engraver beetles, the red turpentine beetle, and the Western pine beetle.
Trees affected: almost all fruit trees, pines, birch, alders, oaks, ash, cedar, elm, and other conifers.
Baiting and fumigating are the best techniques to rid your landscape of these pests. We use a new, highly successful treatment that is attractive to moles and voles— which can often be hard to entice from their tunnels.
Plants affected: All (mostly turf for gophers, moles, voles).
This epidemic (caused by a pathogen) seriously affects oaks throughout California. Abnormal foliage is often the first symptom, showing dead leaves intermixed with green. Branch tips and basal shoots may wilt and turn brown, while the leaves on the rest of the stem remain green. A key symptom, especially for coast live oaks, is the presence of dark, hardened sap seeping from the lower trunk. On maples, you'll often see leaf spots and necrosis on leaf margins. A good effective basal spray with Agri-Fos + Pentra-Bark will help protect your valuable oak. We recommend treating oaks in the fall and spring the first year, then once annually after that.
Trees and plants affected: coast live oak, California black oak, Shreve oak, and tanbark oak, maples, bay laurel, buckeye, honeysuckle, along with many shrubs and perennials (especially rhododendrons).
Can cause severe damage to the canopy and cause dieback and create more pruning. Occurring twice yearly (fall-spring and summer), young oak worm caterpillars skeletonize the leaf surface of native oaks, while older caterpillars chew all the way through the leaf. Partially chewed leaves may turn brown and die. In some years, oak worms can completely defoliate trees by May or June. We treat with “BT”, bacillus thuringiensis, to biologically control oak worms’ damaging effects.
Trees affected: native oaks and plants beneath.
Most flowers are susceptible to damage from caterpillars, which are actually the immature or larval stage of moths and butterflies. Only the larval stage chews plants. Caterpillars chew irregular holes in foliage or blossoms or entirely consume seedlings, young shoots, buds, leaves, or flowers. Some caterpillars fold or roll leaves together with silk to form shelters. Caterpillar feeding can kill or retard the growth of young plants.
Fruit tree and various other leaf rollers can be a serious pest throughout California. These attack a very large number of ornamental trees and are particularly damaging to deciduous and live oaks. We spray with a bacterial preparation to treat your fruit trees.
Plants affected: fruit and nut trees—as well as ash, birch, California buckeye, box elder, elm, locust, maple, poplar, willows, and roses.
There are several varieties of leafhoppers that can defoliate and kill trees and smaller plants. All feed on plant sap. At least one leafhopper species can usually be found feeding on each of the dominant plant species in practically every terrestrial ecosystem. Leafhoppers cause stippling or light-green spotting from feeding on the leaf surface as well as sooty mold.
Plants affected: trees, perennials, roses—a wide variety of woody and herbaceous plants.
These insects are very damaging, with piercing, sucking mouths stripping the leaves and leaving an inky residue. What's worse, they kill valuable plants like rhododendrons, laurel hedges, and Podocarpus. Your ordinarily green leaves will develop a silvery sheen on them, while the undersides of the leaves will get little black spots. Damaged leaves may become papery and distorted. When thrips populations are high on roses, flower buds may become deformed and fail to open. Petals may be covered with brown streaks and spots. There are some effective organic and biological controls we use to kill this pest while avoiding any harm to honeybees.
Plants affected: roses, rhododendrons, laurels, Podocarpus, and other shrubs.
These insects can be serious pests, with populations of some scales increasing dramatically within a few months. Oak pit scale is an issue. Soft scales and some other species excrete honeydew, a sweet, sticky liquid produced by insects that ingest large quantities of plant sap. Your trees may look sickly due to the sticky honeydew and the blackish sooty appearance. When numerous, some scale species weaken plants and cause them to grow slowly. Branches or other plant parts may die if they remain heavily infested with scales. If plant parts die quickly, dead brownish leaves may remain on branches, giving them a scorched appearance. Several years of severe infestations may kill young plants. Scale attacks most fruit trees and can kill new growth and infect twigs. We find this can be biologically controlled, however.
Trees affected: fruit trees, sycamores, elms, and oaks.
Mites are common pests in landscapes and gardens and can be found feeding on many fruit trees, vines, berries, vegetables, and ornamental plants. Mites are not insects, but arachnids like spiders and ticks. Spider mites may feed and reproduce all year on plants that retain their green leaves through the winter, causing damage by sucking cell contents from leaves. These pests can kill a large redwood, pines, and other conifers. They thrive in hot, dusty, dry conditions, and have multiple generations that can attack the trees.
Plants affected: redwoods, pines, conifers, roses, and other shrubs and plants.
These grubs are larvae from Japanese beetles, June beetles, and chafers. They appear C-shaped, off-white in color with a dark head, and cause your grass to die and form brown patches. Treatment of the lawn with a systemic product will prevent future turf damage by controlling the lawn grub population and the expensive cost of replacing the damaged turf!
Plants affected: lawn (turf, grass mixes).
This fungus can coat your beautiful rosebuds and stems in no time! The wind carries powdery mildew spores to new hosts. Believe it or not, all powdery mildew species can germinate and infect in the absence of free water. The best method of control is prevention, especially following good cultural practices. However, some ornamentals do require protection with fungicide sprays or horticultural oils, especially susceptible varieties of rose and crape myrtle. Mild spraying will prevent more infection from occurring.
Plants affected: roses, azaleas, begonia, coral bells, asters, chrysanthemum— almost all ornamentals in a shaded environment.
Organic Treatments
At Arbor Green Services, we consider the health of your trees and plants, endeavoring to use environmentally-friendly products, which are natural and non-toxic to humans and pets.
Why use all-natural, organic ingredients?
When an organic-based solution is used in your yard, you won't have to worry about the lingering effects of the product or whether it's unsafe for your children, pets, fruit, vegetables, or delicate herbs. Organic products are gentle yet can be very effective over time.
Organic soil benefits:
Tree Risk Assessment
If a tree is at risk and in danger of causing harm to people and properties near you, will you know in advance? Not always, so we recommend having your trees checked for their "failure potential." As trained arborists, we consider biology, tree structure, and tree mechanics in our diagnosis. Every tree is different and signs of stress may vary between your oaks, sycamores, elms, and palms.
Arbor Green Services uses the latest diagnostic tools to
identify decay.
Trunk and Root Inspection
Crown (Canopy) Inspection
What can I expect?
One of our ISA Certified Arborists will meet with you to prepare
a comprehensive—yet affordable—report to fit your needs:
