Pruning Perth trees before the hot easterlies arrive

The Perth pruning year

Late winter to early spring (August to October). The main window. Structural pruning, reductions, crown thinning and formative work on young trees. Growth is slow enough to read the framework and the tree has all of spring to respond.

Late spring (November). Last call for deadwooding and shortening long horizontal limbs on big eucalypts before the heat. This is also when the hills-fringe firebreak and fuel hazard reduction notices start to bite, so canopy separation work near structures is best already done.

Summer (December to February). Hazard work only, in the main. Avoid taking substantial live crown off a water-stressed tree in a heatwave — freshly exposed bark scorches. This is peak callout season for storm and limb-drop response.

Autumn and early winter (March to July). Clean-up, gutter clearance before the wet, seed and fruit removal, and planning work for the following spring.

Summer branch drop, and what to do about it

On a hot, still afternoon a mature eucalypt limb fails at the union and comes down. There is no wind involved, often no visible defect beforehand, and it happens to healthy trees. Lemon-scented gums are the notorious ones in Perth — planted in huge numbers from the 1980s and now large enough to matter — but marri and other big gums do it too.

You cannot prune the phenomenon away. What you can do is take the weight and leverage out of the limbs most likely to fail and most likely to hurt something: the long, horizontal ones extending over a driveway, a pool, a patio or a parked car. That is a reduction on those specific limbs plus a general deadwood, and it is the single most common preventative job we quote between August and November.

Gutters, roofs and what lives in the canopy

Marri and lemon-scented gum litter fills Perth gutters quickly, and in the hills that litter is also fuel. Branch contact with a roof gives possums and rats a bridge into the ceiling space, and once they are in, removing the branch is the only part of the problem you can solve with a chainsaw.

Crown lifting off a roofline and clearing the gutter run is a short job on most suburban trees and it is worth doing on a cycle rather than a crisis.

Powerlines

Trimming near service lines and network conductors is constrained by who may approach live wires and how closely. Western Power manages clearance on the street network side; the service line into the property is a separate matter. In both cases the work belongs to a crew accredited for it or is done under an arranged isolation. Nobody should be doing it off a ladder with a pole saw.

Local species notes

Marri and jarrah take a sensible reduction and reshoot reliably. WA peppermint is salt tolerant and often multi-stemmed with tight unions that are worth watching. Tuart is slow, structural and better pruned conservatively. Norfolk Island pines and other conifers will not reshoot from bare wood, so what you cut off is gone permanently. Palms are tidied, never shortened.

More detail on the work itself is on the tree pruning service page. Council rules by suburb are on the service areas page, and pricing factors are in the cost guide.

Call (08) 9516 2804 for a free onsite assessment.