Davey Tree Flipbooks

17 September/October 2022 | THE DAVEY BULLETIN LEADERSHIP DAVEY BOARD HAS FIELD EXPERIENCE IN HOUSTON Top right: Pictured from left at Becks Prime Restaurant in Houston are Davey Board of Director members Alejandra Evans, Donald Brown, Catherine Kilbane, Pat Covey, Matthew Harris, Thomas Haught, and Karl Warnke. Since 1988, Davey has cared for the magnificent live oak trees surrounding the famous Becks Prime Restaurants that dot the Houston landscape. The Davey Board of Directors held their July board meeting on the road in the Houston, Texas area to experience several Davey field operations. They visited the following sites along the way: Davey Resource Group (DRG) Utility Vegetation Management services (UVM) employees are working on a rapid data collection project for CenterPoint Energy. DRG employees patrol CenterPoint Energy power lines in the Houston area and surrounding commu- nities looking for locations where vegetation may be encroaching into the line clearance area using Davey's proprietary software ResourceKeeper. Environmental Design, Inc., a Davey affiliate (EDI), worked with the city of Houston to relocate existing trees lining one of its most historic streets in Uptown Houston: Post Oak Boulevard. A new bus lane being added to the boulevard to improve commuter transit service necessitated removing all the existing trees along the route, nearly 400, and replacing them with over 900 carefully trained live oak trees designed to provide enough canopy clearance for bus, car, and pedestrian traffic to travel beneath. The existing trees were relocated to nearby parks and open land. The crews at CenterPoint Energy have learned how important the right equipment is for the job. As one of the few locations within Davey to have three Jarraffs, the Davey Tree Surgery Company CenterPoint crews maximize efficiency with the Jarraffs, aerial lifts, and specialized mowers for cleaning up the brush work specific to the needs of this account, which Davey has served since 2002. The equipment allows the crews to cover more ground efficiently. The Davey Institute's Sarah Ruark, technical advisor, and A.D. Ali, manager, technical services, gave a demonstration on sonic tomography, a type of ultrasound that can help Davey arborists see inside a tree to locate potential decay or cavities in above ground woody parts, such as the trunk and scaffold limbs. The South Houston Residential/ Commercial (R/C) services office services trees complementing numerous landmarks throughout the Houston area, including: • Becks Prime Restaurant • Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens • The Tanglewood Neighborhood Demonstrations of tree pruning, via both arborist climbing and aerial lift scenarios, were performed at the Tanglewood site along with Plant Health Care services, tree injections and a deep-root fertilization by crew members from the South Houston office with various support from the Davey Institute, corporate, safety and regional skills trainer teams. Commercial Landscape Services (CLS) restored the landscape at the Retreat at the Woodlands following a devastating historic freeze in Texas last year, which killed countless trees and plants. The landscape of the Retreat at the Woodlands surrounds 10 separate buildings with more than 240 apartments, and features a resort-style pool, barbeque area and exercise facility. CLS now handles the mowing, weeding, edging, string trimming, shrub and hedge pruning, irrigation inspections, plant health care, pest management, and other landscape needs for the complex. In addition, the North Houston office performed tree care work on the property thanks to the prior relationship CLS had with the client.

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