Professional Landscaping Maintenance

Do I really need a professional landscaping company to handle the simple elements of maintenance I can do myself?
You do not have to pay anyone to do the genuinely simple if it is indeed genuinely simple. The problem people run into when they try to maintain their own landscaping features is they mistake symmetry, order, and form as something easy to maintain. Harmony has a way of concealing its complexity behind the façade of deceptively simple appearance. In many ways, a landscape is a mirror into reality itself—there is always more to it that what meets the eye at face value.

Professional landscaping maintenance will definitely cost extra money. However, it is the only reliable way to manage the growth of your landscaping elements that organically evolve the intended forms through natural processes. We do not interfere with Nature’s directions and designs—we simply direct them gently toward intended outcomes.

There is a pickup truck driving around my neighborhood advertising gardening services. Is that what you mean by professional landscaping maintenance?
It depends on what types of gardens these contractors specialize in maintaining. Flower beds and plantings of monkey grass are equivalent to do-it-yourself landscaping that a basic knowledge of plant life in general is sufficient to maintain.

More elaborate garden designs need much more than simple yard work know-how to maintain. The best rule to follow is: take it back to the source. IE: if a professional landscaper painstakingly designed and installed your garden, then you are investing in its possible destruction if you hire an unknown or an amateur to maintain it simply on the basis of short-term savings.

While expensive gardens share the same basic needs as simple gardens for water, sunlight, and fertilizer, the commonality ends here. The more complex and diverse a plant population becomes, the more it will need an expert knowledge of particular plant species and what cultivation and fertilization techniques will benefit the system as a whole as opposed to only one or two individual plants.

Investing in a professional landscaping maintenance agreement is your best hope of ensuring that you will preserve what the original landscaper intended. Ideally, it is best to contract your original landscaper as your as the “gardener on call,” so to speak, because the person who installed the garden knows best how to maintain it.
Why not hire tree trimming contractors to handle tree overgrowth?
You may be assuming that a large tree is more indestructible than it actually is. The reality is, the tree has many vulnerable points that can damage or kill it if it is damaged or struck in these places. Roots that appear minor may actually be the equivalent of major arteries. Branches that appear to be useless may actually cause other portions of the trunk and neighboring branches to die if excessively trimmed or removed outright. Bark, which looks dead to us, is actually very much a living and vital covering for the interior wood pulp of the trees trunk. Scarring the bark opens up the tree to infection by disease and infestation by parasites.

Exterior World’s professional landscaping maintenance crews are trained in tree preservation and bound by a strict set of company guidelines to never compromise the health or safety of a tree to create a temporarily pleasing scene. In the long run, a dead tree ruins a landscape and tragically ends a beautiful life of one of Nature’s most perfect forms.

Any landscaping maintenance you need done at the bottom of a tree or anywhere close to shallow root systems needs to be done by an expert. If you take a shortcut and accidentally end up with a dead tree, the cost of tree removal will cost you a small fortune on top of a diminished property value.

Can I install my own tree lights or have a freelance contractor do it?
No. You need a professional lighting design firm trained in tree friendly lighting techniques who will use commercial grade lighting fixtures in your trees which you will not be able to obtain through retail channels or get from the back of an unmarked pickup truck offering you a “free trial.”

Never trust a questionable source that is obviously questionable for a reason. In fact, ask us to find you a lighting company that we are confident will work with, never against, the health of your trees and the beauty of your yard.

Are landscaping maintenance contracts expensive?
To be honest, they are neither free nor “cheap” in the colloquial sense. However, they are the equivalent of insurance that save you money in the long term by preventing pay as you go hourly costs from overtaking your budget prematurely and unexpectedly. Also, they guarantee specific services in writing and specific intervals at which you can expect said services to be rendered. Best of all, they spell out in plain brass tax, with nothing to hide, what you need to spend, and what you can expect to gain from your financial investment.