A tree company that tells you when the tree can stay
We started because Cape Coral's sixty-year-old canopy is failing one storm at a time, and too many of its best trees were being hat-racked by crews with a chainsaw and no arborist — while the Australian pines and the dead pines that should have come down were still standing over bedrooms and seawalls.
Cape Coral was dredged out of a mangrove and pine-flatwoods peninsula starting in 1957, platted into 80-by-125-foot lots along 400 miles of canals, and planted by the people who bought the lots. So its trees are a sixty-year experiment: the ficus, black olives, mahoganies and Australian pines of the original south Cape units, the slash pines left standing when the flatwoods were built over, the royals and coconuts along the Gulf-access canals, the queens and foxtails of the 1980s–2000s subdivisions, and in the north, tens of thousands of still-vacant lots where the burrowing owls and gopher tortoises live. Every hurricane since Charley has sorted the good choices from the bad, and Ian sorted them hardest.
Cape Coral Tree Co. is a locally operated tree company — not a franchise, not a lead-gen call center — that books and manages tree work across Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres, Pine Island, the beaches and the rest of Lee County. The crews that work through us carry general liability and workers' compensation insurance, which Florida doesn't require of tree services and which you should insist on anyway; the certificate is available before anyone climbs. We have an ISA Certified Arborist on staff who looks at the tree before anyone sells you a removal, and who writes the risk letters under F.S. 163.045 only when a tree has earned one. We know which rules apply where — none in the Cape, permits in Fort Myers and on the islands, owls and tortoises and mangroves everywhere — and we've cleared this county after Charley, Wilma, Irma, Ian, Helene and Milton.
What we stand on
Look first, then quote
An arborist walks the lot, reads the species, the lean, the root flare, the decay and the storm history, and tells you honestly whether the tree needs to come down. About half the trees we're called to remove can stay with pruning. We'd rather tell you that than take the job.
Rig it, don't drop it
Trees over houses come down in sections on ropes, or by crane when the lot is boxed in. Nothing lands on the cage, the seawall or the dock, and nothing goes in the canal. Palms are hauled, not chipped. Stumps are ground after 811 has marked the yard. The lawn is raked.
Prune to the standard
ANSI A300 cuts at the collar, under a quarter of the live crown, never topping, never lion-tailing, never a hurricane cut on a palm. A tree pruned wrong is a tree that fails in the next storm, and we won't do it even when it's what you were told you needed.
Respect the rules that exist
Cape Coral doesn't permit tree work on your lot, and we don't invent paperwork. But the owls, the tortoises, the eagles and the mangroves are protected by the state, and the islands and Fort Myers have real permits. We flag the burrows, refer the mangroves and file the permits where they apply.
Answer the phone — 24/7
Hurricanes and thunderstorms don't keep office hours. Call at 2 AM with a limb through the lanai and someone answers, a crew is dispatched by priority, and the paperwork happens after the tree is off the house. Crews work Monday through Saturday; estimates are usually scheduled within a day or two.