Utah’s premier tree care service for over 40 years

It started with a climber

Brian Getzelman founded ArborCare in 1985. He was the first certified arborist in Utah, a national and international tree climbing competition champion, and the Utah Community Forest Council’s Arborist of the Year in 1993. He also co-founded that council and served as its first president.

Four decades on, the work has changed more than you would think. Treatments that once ment spraying the canopy of a tree can now be applied using a bark band application. We follow the research and adopt what works, which is why our staff keep training long after their certificates arrive.

Every applicator here is licensed, and every one of them is trained in tree identification, biology and physiology. We keep that sharp with quizzes: a branch lands on the table, and the answer has to include the species, the insect or disease on it, and the treatment that fixes it. Naming the tree is most of the way to naming the problem.

Most customers come back the following year

Alongside those names we look after a long list of residential and commercial properties, many of them for years. Customers renew because the trees are visibly better, which is the only argument in this business that really works.

New clients tell us the same thing, and it is a low bar that the industry keeps failing to clear: a person answers the phone. Whether it is a general question, a second opinion, or a request for an arborist to come and look at something, someone here will take the call. Two people are in the office Monday to Friday, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

What we are really good at

Bringing trees and shrubs back from poor health. That is the work: spraying, soil treatments, trunk injections, insecticide and fungicide bark banding, and root zone fertilizing, applied to the right plant at the right time of year.

An ornamental or shade tree in a city is living somewhere it did not evolve for: compacted soil, reflected heat, competing turf, alkaline ground, and less water than it would like. Most of what goes wrong traces back to one of those. Getting the diagnosis right is the whole job; the treatment is the easy part.