It Gets Me Out: a new series on jobs done outside.
Left to its own devices, a tree will prune itself. It will ruthlessly drop lower branches in the quest to harvest maximal sunlight and will deaccession large chunks of personal real estate during times of botanical crisis. In cities, which teem with soft humans and their crushable objects, tree pruners (who focus on tree health) and trimmers (who also serve the gods of aesthetics) mediate between a tree’s goals and the community at large.
The best part of pruning is the trees, says Joe Lamb, who has been doing it ever since he was a film student at San Francisco State in the 1980s. Back then, the work was “a temporary thing, just to stay alive.” But the architecture of trees proved endlessly fascinating, as was the problem of how to edit them. Up in a tree, you can often only see the branches right in front of you. The ability to extrapolate from those branches to the whole of an entire tree is both a skill and something that can’t entirely be taught.
Another best part: the coworkers. In some countries, becoming a professional tree trimmer is preceded by years of training in arboriculture. In the U.S., for better or worse, it may be preceded by someone asking you if you think you could prune that tree. This low barrier to entry and a not-awful hourly wage attracts people across lines of race, class, culture, and language (fluency in Spanish is helpful). Coworkers may be arborists, college kids, or people sans formal schooling. Some trimmers migrate on to more lucrative, less physically demanding jobs in urban forestry. Others, like Lamb, stay for decades.
GETTING STARTED
Pay is $20–$40 per hour depending on skill, perhaps more if you own the business. Work requires comfort with heights, power tools, and physical labor; diplomacy is a plus. Courses in arboriculture, like at City College, Merritt College, or Foothill, can be a good way in.
It’s dangerous work, shimmying up a tree and spending hours up there with nothing but a chainsaw for company. The loosey-goosey safety practices of Lamb’s youth were supplanted years ago by more rigorous protocols, but Lamb has hearing aids in both ears due to youthful inattentiveness to ear protection. People who stick with the job are the kind who look out for others—if you’re the one up in the tree with the saw, you’re also the one who gets your lunch hoisted up so you can eat your sandwich with the birds and squirrels.
The worst part of trimming is the people who fight over trees. Lamb is occasionally brought in to trim when one neighbor sues another whose tree is blocking a view of something said neighbor would like to look at. Feelings ride high when parties might be spending six figures in legal fees. Lamb likes his clients to be happy. But, he says, “at the end of a view pruning, usually you’re successful if both people are unhappy, because you’ve had a meeting between their extreme desires.”
To be a tree pruner, says Lamb, start pruning trees. Look for entry-level jobs like “groundskeeper.” Jobs are plentiful, and likely to increase with the $42 million worth of tree cover coming to the Bay Area via the Inflation Reduction Act. Much of that money is aimed at low-income areas where trees have been on the decline, despite their proven ability to improve local air quality and keep temperatures down. “As everything starts heating up, it’s going to be critically important to keep our urban forests healthy,” says Lamb. “It’s a beautiful profession I think people should consider.”
