Tiley's Tree Services

Tiley's Tree Services runs out of Ashburton and covers Melbourne's eastern and south eastern suburbs. The crew are certified arborists, and the phone is answered Monday to Friday from 7am to 4pm, which is when the trucks are out anyway. It is a straightforward operation: take the tree down, grind the stump, clean up properly, and turn what is worth keeping into firewood rather than tipping it.

Tree removal is the main game, and Tiley's take on the complex and hazardous jobs rather than only the easy drops. That includes trees close to power lines and trees leaning over a house or a fence, the sort where the risk sits in the rigging rather than the cutting. Dead and diseased trees get priority, because they are the ones that shed limbs once the wind gets up.

Stump removal is done by grinding, at or below ground level so nothing reshoots and there is nothing left to catch a mower blade. Root removal is available as an extra where a block is being cleared properly rather than just tidied. Tree pruning covers the usual work: deadwood out, weight off overextended limbs, clearance where branches have settled onto a roof. They make a point of cleaning up thoroughly and keeping disruption to the surrounding garden down, which on a stump grind is the difference between a tidy hole and a lawn buried in chip.

Hedge trimming keeps boundary and screening hedges in shape instead of letting them turn into a wall of bare sticks with green on the top. Wood chipping deals with the arisings on site. What comes off the bigger jobs feeds the firewood side, seasoned down to a low moisture content so it burns hot and clean rather than smouldering and smoking out the neighbours. Their line on it is that the wood comes from trees they have already removed or pruned, so it is given a new purpose instead of going to waste.

The service area is Ashburton and the surrounding eastern suburbs and south eastern suburbs of Melbourne. That patch is heavy with established gardens on older blocks: big liquidambars, elms and gums that went in when the houses did and are now well past the size the yard was designed around. Work like that needs someone who can get gear in through a side gate, which in Ashburton is most of the job.