Tree Doctor and Arborist for Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley
We treat disease and insect infested trees. Experienced Arborists & Horticulturists.
Whether you need help maintaining your trees for optimal health or disease diagnosis, you will be taken care of by our complete range of tree care services.
Diagnosis first, treatment second
Most of the calls we take start the same way. Something is wrong with a tree, somebody has already given an opinion, and the homeowner cannot tell whether that opinion is worth acting on. Our work begins by answering that question. A tree health assessment tells you what the problem actually is, how far along it is, and what the realistic options are, and it costs a fraction of what a wrong treatment costs.
That order matters more in the desert than most places, because a great many declining trees here are not infected with anything. They are short of a nutrient the soil is holding onto, or they were trimmed too hard, or the irrigation was changed in spring and nobody connected it to the thin canopy in July. Spraying those trees does nothing except empty a tank.
What we see most in the Coachella Valley
Palms. Date palms, California fan palms and old Canary Island date palms make up a large share of what we look at, from resort frontages in Rancho Mirage to back gardens in Bermuda Dunes. Half the palm diseases people read about online do not occur in California at all, and telling the few that do from the many that do not is most of a palm tree diagnosis.
Hedges and screens. Ficus hedges give this valley much of its privacy, and three different insects distort their leaves in three different ways. We wrote about telling those three apart because they get treated as one problem and sprayed for no reason. Oleander is the other workhorse screen, and it has a problem with no cure. Oleander leaf scorch was first noticed on the Palm Springs to Indio line in the early nineties, so this valley is not somewhere the disease spread to. It is one of the two places in the state it was first seen.
Sap feeders. Sticky leaves and black sooty mold on citrus, mulberry and ornamentals usually mean whitefly, scale or aphids. The response is rarely a broad spray, because that tends to make the following season worse by killing the tiny wasps that were doing the work for free. Controlling the ants on the trunk often matters more than anything in a tank.
Why desert conditions change the answer
Advice written for Florida or the coast does not transfer here, and following it is a common way to spend money on the wrong thing.
The soil holds nutrients hostage. Alkaline desert soil locks up iron, manganese and zinc even when they are present in the ground. A tree can be starving in soil that a lab says is adequate, which is why nutrient deficiency treatment here is about correcting availability rather than simply feeding more.
Bark burns. A trunk facing southwest in La Quinta or Indio takes an amount of direct afternoon sun that trees from anywhere else never see. Damaged bark is the entry point for both sooty canker and flatheaded borers, which is why we are careful about how much canopy comes off a tree in June.
This valley is a protected area. Riverside County east of Cabazon, which is every property from Palm Springs through Palm Desert out to Indio and Coachella, is the area California's date palm quarantine exists to protect. Palms of the genus Phoenix and their seed, and the saws and knives used to prune them, cannot be brought in from the rest of the state unless the tools have been certified as sterilized. Tools are named in the regulation alongside the trees, because tools are how that disease actually travels.
Rain is not going to help. Indio gets around three inches of rain in a year. Nothing gets washed out of the soil the way it does in a wet climate, and nothing gets diluted either.
Where we work
Our office is on Highway 111 in La Quinta and we cover the valley end to end, for homes and commercial properties alike. Each town has its own page, because the problems are not the same from one end of the valley to the other.
When it is worth calling
Call quickly for a palm with a loose or dead spear, a crown that is tilting, a trunk that sounds hollow, or a large limb cracked over something you would mind it landing on.
Call at a normal pace for a canopy that thins a little more every year, one-sided branch death, leaves that are sticky or blackened, a trunk that is narrowing near the top, or a quote you have been given and want a second set of eyes on. Sorting a real problem from a sales pitch is the everyday work of an arborist, and a tree doctor visit costs a lot less than a mature tree.
When it comes to your trees, you deserve the best.
Tree Doctor and Arborist for Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley
78365 Hwy 111 #203La Quinta, CA 92253