James R. Collins

Your tree made it through the hurricane. No visible damage, no cracked trunk, no obvious lean. You did your post-storm walkthrough, everything checked out — and three weeks later, with no new wind event at all, it’s leaning hard or it’s already down. Delayed root plate failure weeks after a Florida hurricane isn’t a fluke […]

Hurricane season is coming, and you’re looking at a tree that seems a little bare, maybe shedding bark in a few spots. Identifying dead trees before hurricane season in Florida starts with a question worth answering carefully: is this tree actually dead, or just going through something completely normal, before you decide whether it needs

A crack has shown up in your slab foundation, or maybe along an exterior wall, and there’s a tree standing close by that seems like the obvious explanation. Protecting foundations from tree roots in Florida starts with a question most people skip entirely: is the tree actually the cause here? In Florida specifically, that assumption

Maybe you were standing right there for the flash and the bang, watching bark fly off a trunk in real time. Or maybe you’re looking at a tree that’s been quietly declining for weeks with no clear cause, and a rough storm season a few months back is starting to feel like the missing piece.

You watch a tree topple in a storm, roots and all, and the trunk and canopy look completely intact — nothing wrong with the tree itself. A few properties over, a similar tree in similar wind barely lost a limb. Why Florida’s sandy coastal soil increases tree failure risk usually comes down to something you

Maybe a neighbor mentioned your tree “might be invasive.” Maybe you noticed clusters of small red berries on a tree in your yard this winter and started wondering. Either way, identifying invasive tree species in Florida is trickier than most people expect, because a lot of native trees get mistaken for the real thing. That