Kryn Dykema, ISA Certified Arborist RM-8846A

Trees provide immense value to our mental health and to our environment. A house with trees around it is a different place to live. Kids playing underneath trees measurably do better. Trees provide shade, they clean our air, they keep the soil healthy, and they build a stacked ecosystem, layers of habitat for birds and bees and every other creature that lives in them. And they are beautiful.

They are also long-lived, complex organisms. Something like a human who lives to be two hundred years old with its roots in the soil. We have more in common with them than most people assume, and once you start noticing how much the trees around you are affecting you, it is hard to stop noticing.

What became obvious with more education was how much misconstrued knowledge is out there. People approach trees mechanically. Trees are not machines. Diagnose and assess one as an organism, with a full comprehensive view, and it is the same as having a good doctor. A doctor who only looks at the symptom is only going to treat the symptom, and you are left with the pain or the illness still there.

That is what happens with trees constantly. A root gets cut or a tree takes mechanical damage, that leads to a disease, the disease kills a limb. If you look at the limb and say we will just prune that off, the disease and the original cause are both still in place. In Colorado the soil lacks both moisture and nutrients, and maple trees in a lot of Boulder neighborhoods, more so the further east you go, are deficient in iron. Same as a person who does not eat well and keeps pushing through: eventually you get sick.

When a tree is not looked at until it has a canopy full of dead limbs, the honest framing is stage three or stage four. If you care about your trees the way you care about your family, then we throw the book at it and do everything we can. But nobody lets a lump on the dog go for years before taking it to the vet. We care about our animals. Trees deserve the same treatment, earlier.

It means looking at the whole ecosystem, because a property is an ecosystem. The bushes, the shrubs, the grass, the mulch, and what is underneath the mulch. On a Boulder job the mulch gets pulled back, and then the weed barrier under it gets pulled back, and this is so common: underneath it looks like the Sahara Desert. Cracked earth. Squiggle trails where worms used to travel. Completely dry.

That thick barrier does not let moisture through. There is so little moisture in Colorado to begin with that when it hits any kind of resistance it pools on top rather than passing down. In Vermont the water would work its way through the same fabric. Here it does not. So the barrier comes out and thick mulch goes down, which insulates the soil and holds moisture in it.

Grass does the same thing from above. Run thirty minutes of water over a tree with roots four inches down and three inches of turf on top, and the grass takes nearly all of it. It is a basil plant in a small pot: dense root system, and the soil is dry again by tomorrow. Often the right move is to remove the grass around the tree and put down mulch.

There are three keys to soil health. Retain the moisture. Keep oxygen flowing, which is the other thing weed barrier ruins. Keep an insulating layer on top. Those are the things a holistic arborist can see, and there are not many arborists in Boulder taking a full ecosystem perspective.

The same view applies over time, not just across a yard. If you have 50 or 60 year old trees reaching the end of their lives and younger trees coming up underneath them, the young ones need space and cannot be height-limited by the limbs above. And if you have a 40 year old tree, that is the moment to plant the next generation, because a young tree needs about 15 years to establish. Do it then and by the time the old tree is declining there is already a canopy underneath it. Wait until the limbs start falling and you have bought yourself a 15 year gap.

Number one is underground. Trees cannot be root bound. A tree planted inside a rock wall sends roots outward, they hit the wall, they turn ninety degrees, and the tree girdles itself. The roots circle and circle and eventually the tree dies. His aunt in Denver went through three cherry trees over thirty years. Each one grew to about ten feet, covered itself in cherries, and died at ten years old. The cause was the hole they were planted in: glazed sides. Same failure, three times, thirty years, and nobody looking below grade to find it.

Water, nutrients, root restriction, and soil-borne disease all live down there, out of sight. Some of it is treatable with fungicides, plant resistance activators, or systemic insecticides. But the pattern worth understanding is that insects go after weak trees. A dry ash is far more susceptible to ash borer than a well-watered one. If your immune system is down and somebody coughs near you, you catch it. If you have been eating well, your body fights it off.

The third one is pruning, and it is the one homeowners can control. Trees cannot close over stubs. If a cut is not made right at the branch bark ridge it creates a giant wound. The cambium, the vascular tissue on the outside of the tree, splits below the stub, and heartwood starts to be exposed. Exposed heartwood shortens the life of a tree. Picture a twenty year old maple with its heartwood open. It is like having your bones exposed. That heartwood has to be sealed to keep insects and rot out, and if it goes weak the tree becomes structurally compromised and comes down.

Which is where cavities come from. Climbing a maple on a routine pruning job, there will be a cavity on top of a limb where somebody made a cut horizontal to the sky. Rain falls straight into it, it never seals, and it hollows out. Some of them will take a whole arm. Filling cavities with a structurally sound material is old arboricultural practice, going back to the 1920s, and it is one of the things Kryn does most often in Boulder. He has never seen another arborist in town do it. They leave the cavity open, or they remove the entire limb. But those limbs are often 12 to 14 inches wide, and cutting one out creates a huge wound and removes a large share of the leaf area the tree uses to collect sun and make the sugars it eats. Filling the cavity saves trees.

Calm, approachable, thorough. A client up Boulder Canyon with a pond and beautiful maples hanging over it chose Boulder Tree Surgeon over every other bid, and it was not the cheapest one. What people respond to is being walked through what is actually happening on their property instead of being handed a number.

Kryn grew up in Boulder, which is rare in this trade. He runs a small business and is in graduate school to become a therapist. The crew is from Boulder too; they went to high school together, and they are easy to have on your property. Clients end up becoming friends. Some of them say they love him. At the end of the day he is your arborist, and then you sit down and have a coffee or a beer.

There is also plenty of straightforward by-the-book work: property management companies send a job, the proposal goes out, it gets approved, and nobody ever meets. That is fine. But what tends to matter most to people is the part that is harder to advertise, which is that he genuinely cares about bringing trees back to life.

The track record is real. Other arborists have looked at a maple with a dead top half and called it a removal. Kryn has climbed those trees, cut the top out, made the cut properly and sealed it so it cannot rot, and the tree is still alive five years later. Same with ash. Read online and you will be told an infested ash has a two year lifespan and that injection and pruning will not work. He has brought ash trees back many times.

It runs the other way too. If a tree cannot handle a pruning, the pruning does not happen. If a client wants a cut made that will kill the tree, he will try to talk them out of it. And sometimes it goes badly anyway. A spruce on Fourth with a root fungus got injected to try to save it and was stone dead within a year. The removal was offered at a discount because the injection did not take. That is the honest version.

Look at a sixty foot maple that is eighty years old. At the tree farm that tree was four feet tall and about three hundred dollars, plus another hundred and change to plant it. Call it a five hundred dollar tree. Then it needed sixty years of pruning, fertilization, and watering to get where it is. The large ash and maple trees sitting in Boulder yards with dead limbs in them are worth tens of thousands of dollars. A big maple or an oak can be worth fifty thousand in aesthetic value, in intrinsic value, and in what it does for the people who live under it.

Against that, a big property with 20 or 30 trees can expect to spend somewhere around five to eight thousand dollars every ten years on tree work. The maintenance is not the expensive part of owning trees. Losing them is.

The hardest thing to get people to do is water, because water costs money. But deep watering is what actually works, and it is not thirty minutes. During the dry season you are building a water table. That means a sprinkler running over the square footage at the base of the tree for two hours or more to get water soaking 14 inches down, deep enough to move nutrients out of the soil and into the tree. Shake-and-feed around the base first, then deep water, and you have given your tree a giant drink of electrolyte water. It does push the water bill up. It is also incredibly effective, and watching trees go green and vibrant and keep living is the whole point.

Trees in Colorado get a lot of sun and a lot of exposure to elements like snow and wind, so limbs frequently need structural pruning to ensure their long term integrity. Wet spring snow loads canopies far beyond what they carry the rest of the year, and that is when poorly structured trees fail.

Boulder also carries a specific pest history. Emerald ash borer was first detected in Colorado right here, by Boulder Forestry in September 2013, and the City has been managing it longer than anywhere else in the state. Meanwhile fire is a growing risk across the county, from the canyon communities to the grassland edges.

Pests, diseases, and below-ground conditions are all treatable or avoidable, as long as they are caught early enough, diagnosed properly, and addressed with the right approach. That sequence is the whole job.