08/30/2026
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a question I see asked all the time:
What is an arborist?
Usually the answer is some version of “someone who cares for trees.”
That’s true, but man, it feels incomplete.
What does it actually mean to care for a tree?
Trees don’t exist by themselves. They exist in soil, water, forests, yards, cities, construction sites, businesses, families, economies, and communities. They have histories. The things we see today are often the result of decisions made years or decades ago.
That means arboriculture is inherently multidisciplinary.
I am a master in my craft, but being a master has mostly taught me how enormous the craft actually is.
There is no “best arborist.”
Nobody is the best climber, diagnostician, soil scientist, PHC technician, consultant, trainer, communicator, businessperson, and everything else at the same time.
The real skill is developing depth in your own areas, enough breadth to understand the others, and enough humility to know when someone else needs to be part of the solution.
I’ve been mentoring another arborist recently, and it has made this really tangible for me.
A few weeks ago, he was mostly focused on doing the work.
I encouraged him to start taking notes.
The notes became journaling.
Journaling led him to start looking at the financial side of his jobs.
That led to thinking about equipment, capacity, his future, and what he was actually trying to build.
Eventually he asked me:
“Should I test to become an ISA Certified Arborist?”
I told him, “Maybe.”
Not because the credential doesn’t matter.
Because why you want it matters.
When I first became an ISA Certified Arborist, the learning had already been happening for years. Eventually someone handed me the book and basically said, “You should test.”
I did.
The credential didn’t make me an arborist. It became one marker along a much longer path.
I think about BCMA the same way.
It isn’t about somehow becoming a botanist, soil scientist, dendrologist, horticulturist, risk expert, consultant, businessperson, and every other specialty wrapped into one human being.
It’s about being able to see the connections.
Clients will sometimes call me worried about deadwood in a canopy.
They’re looking up.
I’m usually standing at the bottom of the tree touching the root crown, looking at soil, drainage, grade changes, construction, compaction, species, and site history.
I care about the deadwood.
But I’m trying to understand why it is there.
What happened 10 or 20 years ago that created what we’re looking at today?
And what are the decisions we make today going to create 10 or 20 years from now?
I’ve realized I look at a lot of life this way.
Trees. Business. Education. Employees. Parenting. Relationships. Communities.
The visible problem usually isn’t the whole problem.
Our industry gets distracted sometimes by the shiny stuff, gear, machines, credentials, titles, production, status.
Those things can represent real accomplishment.
They can also mean almost nothing.
A credential without development is decoration.
Technical skill without judgment has limits.
Knowledge without the ability to communicate it dies inside the person who possesses it.
So maybe “What is an arborist?” isn’t really the question.
Maybe the better question is:
What do we need to become, individually and collectively, to actually care for trees well? This is a 100 year type of question, because trees live for a long time.
Because no one person is the arborist.
Arboriculture is a network of people with different strengths, different knowledge, and different experiences, moving toward a common cause:
Protecting trees, the natural resources surrounding them, and the people who depend on them.
That feels a lot closer to what this profession means to me.
