Welcome

My name is Steve. I am, among other things, an arborist. What's that? In the technical sense it means I manage and maintain trees for a living. You know ... a tree "surgeon". I use quotes because becoming an actual surgeon requires many, many years of difficult and expensive education. In contrast, absolutely anyone can call themselves a tree surgeon. The term has no legal meaning and I wish it would vanish. I care for trees.

This is a blog about trees. More specifically, tree identification. It complements and extends a free service my company, Artisan Tree & Treehouse, runs for the local communities in and around Philadelphia. This blog's ultimate purposes are: to foster knowledge about trees; to be a focal point for our Philadelphia tree group; to expand my own knowledge of all things arboreal through mutual exchange.

My goal is for people to start paying attention to the magnificent trees of their surroundings. I bet there are trees that you have passed a thousand times without ever once stopping to really look. When a child asks an adult "What kind of tree is that?", I want them to have a ready answer.

I was getting a haircut recently and the coiffuse informed me that she recently had a bunch of trees cut down on her property. I asked her what kind of trees they were and she responded, "You know, the kind with leaves". Trees give us beauty, shade, food, lumber, shelter and inspiration. It's time we stopped cutting them down just because we don't want to rake. It's time we woke up and appreciated the wonderful green backdrops that whiz by our car windows every day. Ignorance of the natural world snowballs with each passing generation. It's time we stepped back and looked at some trees.