The Care of Trees

I hired this company last year for scale treatment on a tree above my driveway for honeydew. This year the scale wasn’t that bad so I decided to not hire them since it was so expensive. However, 3 weeks ago I noticed a hang tag on the door that stated not only my 35 foot red oak was treated but the 3 year old, 10 foot white oak was treated as well. I did t think anything of it until the bill came. To treat both trees and apply a liquid fertilizer cost $ 535. What’s important to note is that I never gave permission for this service. I never signed a proposal or gave verbal consent. As a matter of fact I never even spoke with anyone about the service! When I called the company to dispute the service and charges, I was told that a written proposal was sent to me several months ago and claimed that a phone call, which I never received, was made to get my consent. When I didn’t respond to either attempt to contact me the company assumed I wanted the service because I didn’t contact them! What kind of scandalous logic it that? Ultimately after a heated argument the service representative capitulated to my demand and rescinded my bill. Bottom line, Be very careful when dealing with this company.

I used them three times in about 2 ½ years with same arborist. Clearly the quality of customer service has gone down. Moreover, he billed twice for the same work on the same tree and claims this is correct. He gave me an estimate for complete work on a neighbor’s tree growing into my yard and told me to get permission from my neighbor. He then went to my neighbor and gave him a separate estimate. He claims part of the work was on my estimate and the other work is on my neighbor’s estimate. This is not true — all of the work performed was described to me and put on the estimate given to me. Duplicitous.
Plus they showed up without confirming scheduling and they didn’t clean up all of the limbs they cut.
Never again
Update: A company representative contacted me by email then by phone in response to this review. By phone he said he would assist in resolving this as it was worth it to keep repeat customers and that he would get back to me soon. He told me not to pay the bill at the moment as he was going to see what kind of adjustments he could make. Several weeks later I got an email stating that it was my duty to recontact them if the crew had not properly cleaned up. Wow! It is the customer’s fault. Interesting because the contract required clean up. This is a new one on me — blame customer for company not fulfilling contract. He justified the crew coming to my home without scheduling with me because they wanted to get work done. He also denied that the «arborist» discussed the work with me at my home when the estimate was done which doesn’t make sense. He told me to pay full bill and didn’t apologize, but instead he defended the duplicitous double charging for same work on same tree. I have no idea why this company responds to customer complaints. The manager was not big enough to call me back but rather he decided to write an insulting email blaming me. I paid the bill in full as further dispute is not worth my energy. Care of Trees apparently doesn’t value customers and apparently didn’t care about losing a repeat customer. Why respond to a complaint if your response is to blame the customer?

Just sitting outside today looking at a tree that these guys butchered… pathetic work without any professional pride. I had them come twice, finally gave up and paid their bill and had done with them.