FAQ

If you’ve landed on this FAQ page hunting for a straight answer before you pick up the phone, you’re in the right place. Below are the questions people actually ask us on site and over the phone - about cost, about a neighbour’s overhanging branches, about what happens to the wood once it’s on the ground - answered the way we’d explain it standing in your garden, not the way a leaflet would put it.

Some of it sits in legal grey area (hedge height, boundary trees, who’s allowed to cut what), some of it is straightforward truck-load arithmetic, and some only makes sense once you know how a Glasgow back garden, tenement back court or sloped West End plot behaves once a chainsaw starts. Where the honest answer is “it depends on the site visit,” we’ve said so rather than quoting a number that won’t survive contact with your actual tree.

At a Glance

£5 million public liability cover, with an NPTC-qualified Professional Tree Inspector for planning-grade surveys
Full plant fleet owned outright - cherry picker, forwarders, 360 excavators - so no waiting on hired-in machinery
24/7 storm response within 50 miles, average arrival under two hours

What’s covered in a standard visit, and what isn’t

Full felling and sectional dismantling of trees too large, dangerous or awkwardly placed to fell in one piece
Crown reduction, crown thinning, crown lifting and deadwooding, as a single visit or as ongoing management
Hedge cutting and height reduction, once any neighbour consent needed for access or boundary work is in place
24/7 emergency response for storm damage, wind-blown trees and anything that’s come down onto a road, roof or fence
NPTC PTI-led BS5837 tree surveys and risk assessments for planning applications, mortgages and insurance
Advice on Tree Preservation Orders and Conservation Area consent before any protected tree is touched
On-site chipping of brash and branchwood, with logs and heavy timber loaded separately
Removal of all cut material from site, sorted into woodchip and heavy log loads
Tidy-up of the work area - raking, brushing and leaf-blowing lawns, drives and paths
A written quote following a site visit, with a method statement provided on request for insurers or lenders

Not Included / Costed Separately

Cutting back a neighbour’s tree or hedge from their side of the boundary without their written permission, even where it’s legally allowed from your own side
Any work on a tree protected by a TPO or standing inside a Conservation Area until the council has confirmed consent
Full stump grinding, which is priced and scheduled as a separate visit rather than folded into a felling quote
Every last speck of sawdust and fine debris - a final pass with your own lawnmower once the chippings have settled is normal, not a sign the job was rushed
Weekend or out-of-hours call-outs for non-emergency work, which usually carry a premium over a scheduled weekday slot
Replanting stock and new planting labour, which we’ll advise on but quote separately from removal work

How a job runs, from your first call to the last sweep of the drive

Enquiry and rough steer: You call and describe the tree - species if you know it, roughly how big, what it’s doing and where it sits. For straightforward jobs we can give a rough steer on price and timescale there and then; for anything with awkward access, TPO status or storm risk, we’ll book a visit.
Site visit and written quote: Someone from the team walks the site with you, checking access for the truck and chipper, where the tree can land if felled whole, how much material is coming down, and whether it’s subject to a TPO or Conservation Area designation. You get a written quote, not a verbal figure that changes on the day.
Scheduling: Routine work goes into the diary around access and weather; storm and emergency jobs within our call-out radius jump the queue, typically attended the same day.
The work itself: Depending on access and landing zone, that’s either felling from the base or a climber (or the cherry picker) working the tree down in sections, rigging or lowering material out where there’s no room to drop it straight down.
Waste handling and clear-up: Brash goes through the chipper on site, heavy logs are loaded separately, and the ground gets raked, brushed and leaf-blown before we leave - this stage often takes as long as the tree work itself.
Aftercare: For planning or insurance jobs you get the BS5837 report or method statement; for removals, we’ll talk through stump treatment options and what, if anything, is worth replanting.

What tree work in Glasgow tends to cost

Current UK cost guides (MyJobQuote and Checkatrade, 2026) put general tree trimming at roughly £80-£400 per tree, pruning at £250-£1,500, and full removal at £300-£1,500 or more once you factor in size and access. Those ranges are a starting point, not a quote - the same species and rough height can cost very differently depending on your specific garden.

What actually moves the price is access (can the truck and chipper get near the tree, or does material have to be dragged a long way by hand), the landing zone (whether the tree can be felled straight from the ground or has to be climbed and dismantled piece by piece), how much material comes down (we think in truck loads - about 6 cubic metres each - split between woodchip and heavy logs), and how much tidying the site needs afterwards. A tree in rough ground that just needs a rake and a blast with the leaf blower is a different job from an immaculate lawn that needs every stick lifted by hand.

Timing matters too - hedge and tree work between March and August runs into bird nesting season under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, so anything with an active nest gets left or worked around rather than cut through, whatever the calendar says about convenience. None of this replaces an actual site visit: the only way to get a figure you can rely on is to have someone walk your garden and look at your tree.

Whose judgement is actually behind each answer

None of the answers above are pulled from a generic tree-surgery FAQ template - four people wrote this page between them, and each answer traces back to whoever actually deals with that side of the job day to day, rather than a single company line repeated by whoever picks up the phone.

Take the council and TPO questions: those are answered the way Callum Jackson would explain them standing in your garden, because he’s the one who sat the NPTC Professional Tree Inspector exam, prepares the BS5837 paperwork himself and rings the planning officer directly rather than passing a form through a third party. He picked up that qualification a few years into running the company, once enough survey requests were landing on his desk that sending them elsewhere stopped making sense.

The storm call-out and “can you actually get here fast” answers lean on a different person: Neill Tannahill, whose day job as chief fleet engineer is keeping the excavator, forwarders and cherry picker starting first time, which counts for more in a genuine emergency than anything written on a certificate. And where an answer touches what happens if a climb goes wrong - the First Aid +F point that comes up more than once above - that training runs across the whole crew, but it’s Ryan Spark’s background running wilderness and swift-water rescue courses before he came into tree work that shapes how seriously it gets treated on site rather than filed as an induction-day box to tick.

Ron Bowes-Taylor’s rigging and climbing background, built from an NVQ Level 2 Forestry & Arboriculture apprenticeship taken at seventeen, sits behind most of the practical “how does the job actually happen” answers above - what gets climbed, what gets rigged down in sections, what waits for the cherry picker instead. Between the four of them, and the £5 million public liability cover sitting behind all of it, that’s who you’re actually getting an answer from on the phone - see the team page for the fuller version of each background.

Where in the ten-mile radius these questions actually come from

Start with the boundary of where any of this applies: our standard call-out radius is a strict ten miles from the office on Newton Place, off Charing Cross - Clydebank and Renfrew mark roughly the western edge of it, Cambuslang and Rutherglen the south-eastern one, and the two-hour average arrival time quoted above for storm work is measured against that distance, not stretched to cover a wider patch on paper.

Inside that circle, different questions come from genuinely different streets. Ask about a Tree Preservation Order or Conservation Area consent and the calls are weighted heavily toward Pollokshields and the West End - Hyndland, Dowanhill, Kelvinside - where mature Victorian-era planting sits inside designated Conservation Areas and needs Glasgow City Council sign-off before a saw goes anywhere near it, TPO or not. Ask about a hedge dispute or an overhanging branch instead and the pattern shifts to tenement back courts and shared gardens further into the city - Partick, Hillhead, Shawlands, Langside - where one badly kept hedge is rarely just one household’s problem and there’s seldom room to bring a truck close to the boundary.

The storm and wind-risk questions cluster differently again, up on higher ground toward Cathkin Braes and out along the fringe near the Kilpatrick Hills, where the clay-heavy soil sitting under most of the Clyde basin grips a root plate less well in a gale than the same species manages on a sheltered street a few miles nearer the river. That’s also why a call-out from that side of the patch gets treated the same as anywhere else inside the ten miles rather than pushed down the list - the machinery answers above about the cherry picker and excavator matter just as much on an exposed hillside plot as they do on a flat Southside lawn.

Commercial clearance, utility pruning and estate contracts reach across the whole of Scotland, but that’s a different service to anything answered on this page - everything above describes what applies inside the standard domestic radius only.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a tree surgeon in Glasgow charge, and how do you work out a price?

UK cost guides put general trimming at roughly £80-£400 per tree, pruning at £250-£1,500 and full removal from around £300 up to £1,500 or more, but the figure that matters is what your specific tree and garden cost, not the national average. We price on access (how far material has to be dragged to the truck), the landing zone (whether we can fell straight from the ground or have to climb and dismantle piece by piece), how many truck loads of material come off (roughly 6 cubic metres a load, split into woodchip and heavy logs), and how much clearing up the site needs afterwards. You’ll get a written quote after someone has actually walked the garden - not a phone estimate that changes once the truck turns up.

How quickly can you get out for a storm-damaged or dangerous tree?

For genuine emergencies - a tree down on a road, roof, car or fence, or one that’s clearly about to go - we run a 24/7 call-out within 50 miles of our base, with an average arrival under two hours. Non-emergency work goes into the normal diary rather than jumping the queue, so it helps to say upfront whether it’s urgent or routine when you call.

My neighbour’s tree overhangs into my garden. Am I allowed to cut it back myself?

In practice, the thing to do every time is talk to your neighbour first, before anything gets cut. Legally you’re entitled to trim branches back to the boundary line up to a height of 5 metres, and any wood or fruit you cut off technically belongs to the tree’s owner and should be offered back. If you need to get onto their side to do the work safely, or the branches are above 5 metres, you need their permission for access - there’s no shortcut around that.

My neighbour’s hedge blocks the light into my garden - can you just reduce its height for us?

Not without the neighbour’s agreement, no. There’s no law setting a maximum height for a garden hedge on its own, so we won’t turn up and reduce someone else’s hedge on your instruction alone. Where a hedge is over 2 metres and you’ve tried and failed to sort it informally, the route is a complaint to your local council under the high hedges provisions of the Anti-social Behaviour etc. (Scotland) Act 2004, which can force a resolution if the neighbour won’t engage.

Do I need council permission before a tree comes down, and can you deal with the council for me?

It depends on whether the tree has a Tree Preservation Order on it or stands inside a Conservation Area - Glasgow City, East Dunbartonshire and East Renfrewshire councils all cover parts of our patch and each run their own process. Callum, as our NPTC-qualified Professional Tree Inspector, can survey the tree, put together the BS5837-standard paperwork and handle the TPO or Conservation Area application directly with the relevant council on your behalf, rather than leaving you to work out the form yourself.

Are your team properly insured and qualified, or is this a case of turning up with a chainsaw and a van?

We carry £5 million public liability cover, which is the standard level expected on commercial contracts in this trade. On the qualification side: Callum holds NPTC Professional Tree Inspector status (2023) for planning-grade surveys, the whole team is First Aid +F trained for chainsaw-specific and catastrophic bleed emergencies, and our machine operators hold IPAF and NPORS tickets for the cherry picker and 360 excavator plus FMO licensing for the forwarder and skidder work. All tree work is carried out to BS3998 and planning surveys to BS5837.

Will you take the wood and branches away, or is that my job?

Removal and clear-up is part of a standard quote unless you’ve specifically asked to keep the timber. Everything comes off site sorted into two loads - woodchip (anything that fits through the chipper) and heavy logs - because they get handled differently once they leave: logs are seasoned for our own woodfuel, branchwood is chipped for landscaping and biomass use. We’ll rake, brush and leaf-blow the work area before we go, though on a well-kept lawn expect the last of the sawdust and small debris to disappear the next time you mow rather than the day we leave.

Can you just do deadwooding or a crown clean, without a full prune?

Yes - deadwooding (removing dead, dying or diseased branches) and a crown clean are often booked as standalone visits rather than bundled with a full crown reduction, particularly on mature trees where dead limbs are the actual safety concern rather than the overall shape or size of the canopy. It’s usually a shorter, cheaper job than a full prune, and can be the right call if the tree just needs the hazard removed.

Can you provide paperwork for my insurer or mortgage lender, and do you give advice on replanting after a removal?

Yes to both. A written method statement or survey report can be produced to the standard an insurer, lender or planning officer expects, drawing on the same BS5837 framework we use for planning surveys. After a removal, we’ll talk through whether the stump needs treating, what’s realistic to replant given the soil and light in your specific garden, and point you toward species that suit Glasgow’s clay-heavy ground rather than just recommending whatever’s easiest to sell.

Still got a question, or a tree that won’t wait?

If your question isn’t answered above, the fastest route is still a phone call - describe the tree and the situation and you’ll get a straight answer, not a script. And if it’s urgent - a tree down, a hung-up branch, anything that’s actively a hazard - call now rather than waiting for a callback, because that’s the kind of job we prioritise the same day within our call-out radius.

FAQ