Quick answer: New Homeowner Tree Guide — Trees on this coast live with fog, salt, wind and thin soil, and the work that keeps them healthy is decided by those conditions rather than by a calendar written inland. Structure, clearance and the root zone are what a tree here needs looked at, and small work done early is what keeps a tree out of the emergency list.
Field note. What we see on this coast is that the trees people worry about are usually not the ones in trouble: the pine with a clean crown and a lean that predates the house is often sounder than the tidy tree that has been quietly drowning in its own root zone.
On the other hand, there is no schedule that suits every tree — the same species on two sides of one street can need opposite care, which is why we look before we recommend.
A house with mature trees is a house with an inheritance, and the first year is the wrong time to make decisions about it. Trees respond on a scale of years, so a season of observation costs nothing and prevents most of the expensive mistakes.
Month one: look, don’t cut
Walk the property and locate every tree over eight inches of trunk diameter. Note which are close enough to hit the house, which overhang a driveway, and which are within reach of a power drop.
Photograph each one from a fixed point — the same spot each time, with something for scale. That set of photographs is the most useful tool you will own, because change in a tree is invisible without a baseline.
Do not prune anything in the first month. What looks like a defect in February may be normal for the species, and what looks fine may be a hazard.
Month two to four: the safety items only
Dead limbs over a path, a roof or a parking space. Those come out now, and they are the only urgent items on the list.
A tree that has moved — a lean that is new, soil lifted at the base, a crack in the ground. That is not a maintenance item, it is a call, and the call is an assessment.
Everything else waits.
Month five: the ground
This is the work that produces the most benefit and costs the least. Remove the turf from a ring around each principal tree, out to the drip line where the ground allows, and mulch it two to four inches deep, thin at the trunk.
Check the flare first. On a lot that has been landscaped, there is a reasonable chance at least one tree is planted or buried too deep, and the flare is the test. That is the buried flare.
And check where the downspouts empty. A downspout at the base of a tree is a slow death that is fixed in ten minutes.
Month six: the irrigation question
If the garden has a system, find out what it waters and when. On this coast, summer irrigation under a mature native tree is the most common cause of decline, and a new owner inherits whatever programme the last one set.
Turn off the zones that water established oaks, pines and cypress. That single change has rescued more trees than any pruning programme.
Month eight: the inventory
Get a written assessment on the trees that are close to the house. Not a quote — an assessment, with the defect, the likelihood and the target. It establishes a baseline, and it is the document that matters if anything happens later.
Month twelve: the plan
Now you know which trees are sound, which need structure work, and which are a problem. The pruning can start, in the right season, on the trees that need it.
The mistake that kills a tree in year one
Landscaping. A new owner improves the garden, raises the grade around a tree to level a patio, trenches for irrigation, or parks a trailer under a canopy. Each of those damages roots in a way that shows up two or three years later, when nobody connects it to the work.
Before any ground work within the canopy radius, fence it off. That is construction protection, and it applies to a garden renovation as much as to a building site.