Early in his life, Paul Chappell couldn't see the trees because of the clouds. After all, he once wanted to take to the wide, blue skies as a commercial airline pilot.
"In fact, in my senior year in high school I got my pilot's license and started flying. But life just took another direction," said the Harris County resident by way of Henry County, Ga., where he grew up on a beef cattle and hay farm. "I grew up in agriculture, so I knew that growing things and being outside was in my blood, so to speak."
That love of the outdoors eventually pulled Chappell into a career in which he was a natural, with him ultimately becoming a certified arborist in 2003 and launching a business, Diversified Trees, in Pine Mountain, Ga., with friend and fellow arborist Cory Flynn. They grow trees from scratch, while also taking care of those that are mature and aging, sometimes not as gracefully as one would like.
They operate their business on about 23 acres on Hamilton Pleasant Grove Road. One side of the house sells trees to wholesale customers -- not retail to the general public -- while the other side will prune, fertilize and, if need be, remove a tree at a home or commercial property.
"We do want the general public to contact us for tree care issues, anything from tree removals to diagnostics to fertilization to pre-construction planning," Chappell stressed.
The two Diversified Trees arborists, certified by the International Society of Arboriculture, are among a relatively small group of arborists nationwide. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there are about 40,000 individuals who fall into the job classification of "tree pruners and pruners."
The Ledger-Enquirer talked with Chappell, who turns 59 on Monday, about his job, the mission of the tree farm and service, and why people often underestimate the value of a nice, plush tree.
(Diversified Trees on Facebook)
This interview is edited for length and clarity.
How did your career develop in general?
I spent all of my growing up years outdoors. But back in the '80s I got a job with a small nursery and landscape business in Cartersville, Ga. (My wife, Beth, and I) hadn't been married too long. That was my first taste of it. And I ended up working with a landscape company in Atlanta for a number of years. I eventually ended up coming to Callaway Gardens with their horticulture staff in 1994. I was a manager of the Woodland Gardens and the beach grounds and gardens. I did the horticulture amenities for special events, like the old Buick golf tournament and the Master's water ski program and the Steeplechase at Callaway.
That sounds like a busy job.
It was. It was a real rewarding job. I was there eight years, so I wasn't there a long time. But that's where I met my business partner that I'm in business with now, Cory Flynn. He was one of the arborists there at the gardens and eventually was the managing arborist there, and in 2002 Cory and I left together on the same day and started Diversified Trees.
I basically run and manage the growing part of our business, the nursery part, and Cory runs and manages the tree service part of it. Of course, we overlap in all aspects of the business. We're a wholesale tree farm, and we are a professional tree service as well.
Who are your customers?
We sell to landscape contractors, building developers, commercial and residential landscape businesses, municipalities. We sell to re-wholesale business, which buy from us and sell to the public or whatever. We sell to retail garden centers. So we're not open to the general public. All of our business is to the trade.
Just this past week we shipped close to 160 trees up to Cincinnati. We've got customers in Birmingham. We ship to the Biltmore Estate up in Asheville, N.C. Of course, we do a lot of local business -- Atlanta and Columbus and Macon and Montgomery and Auburn, that sort of thing. We basically have customers all over the Southeast. We'll ship wherever we need to as long as we can put the load together for the customer and make it happen.
How about the tree service?
It's very localized. Most of what we do is in a four- or five-county area around us -- Columbus, LaGrange, Harris County, Phenix City, the Auburn and Opelika area.
The bread and butter of any tree service is going to be removal of trees, and there's a lot of people in the area that do tree removal work and do a good job of it. People need them out because they're either dead, or lightning struck them, or they're diseased, or they're going to add on to their house or build onto their deck or expand their driveway. There's all sorts of reasons that trees need to come out.
But you care for them as well?
Being an ISA-certified arborist, one of the other things that we really focus on is tree health care. We try to help people mitigate tree issues before they become problems. We also evaluate and do tree assessments to determine whether or not they're healthy and need fertilization or additional pruning, or if they're to the point where they need to consider taking them down. We do that for LaGrange College. They've been one of our commercial clients for over 10 years. At Green Island Country Club, we do the tree work there.
What's a major issue with trees?
With construction planning, a lot of times people don't think about them. But if they're going to dig foundations and dig trenches through their yard or on commercial sites, and they've got a big oak that they want to save, a lot of people don't think about it until it's too late. They've already put the trencher through the roots system or they've already dug the footers up too close to the tree.
What's the ratio of the nursery versus tree service business?
It's pretty doggone close to 50-50. In slow times for the nursery, like in the summertime when tree sales moderate, the tree service business is really busy. Our busiest time at the farm is usually October through April into the May timeframe.
The tree service is very much consumer-oriented. It's tied to Mr. and Mrs. Jones and whether or not they want to spend the money to work on the trees around their house. Unfortunately, in one sense, a lot of tree work is tied to people's discretionary money. The last several years, however, everybody's been pretty tight with their money, only doing what they have to do. But business has certainly been a lot better this year, and picked up on both sides of the business.
Discuss your arborist certification. What does that take?
The International Society of Arboriculture is probably the biggest and most widely known certification organization. It's a fairly rigorous exam. I think I did my certification in 2003. Cory did his way before that while he was at Callaway Gardens. It's about a four-hour exam, everything to do with tree physiology, tree health care, climbing, roping, rigging, bucket truck and equipment safety, tree planting, soil profile, soil nutrients, diagnostics for tree health care, insects and disease diagnostics.
And, then, once you pass the exam and obtain your certification, it renews every three years and you have to have at least 30 hours of (continuing education) every three years to maintain your certification. So we're always looking for workshops, and we go to conferences.
What's the most challenging aspect of your job?
I think the most challenging part, and this applies to some of the repeat commercial clients, is getting them to understand the value of preventative care versus reactionary work. In other words, when we do a tree assessment, and we're recommending that this particular tree be pruned and fertilized, they may decide not to spend the money on it. But then four years later the tree is dead or in serious decline, and then they spend the money to take it down. I think it's creating awareness of the value of tree health care is the biggest challenge.
That sounds like a dentist, take care of those choppers to prevent cavities and extractions?
(laughs) People don't realize how much of an asset trees are to the value of their homes. For instance, and I can't quote the studies, but I've read different reports and reviews, particularly in urban settings, where a house for sale that has no trees versus a house that has nice trees, you can get just about count on 15 to 20 percent more value in the house.
Plus, there's the cooling effect in the summertime to help keep air conditioning bills down, and just the pleasure of being out in the yard when you've got nice shade. People look at them and enjoy them, and until they have a problem, they really don't do anything for them. They don't feed them, they don't fertilize them, they don't prune them, they don't take care of them until a big limb falls down on the roof. Then they call us to come look at it and see what we can do to save their tree.
It's not just about us selling the business. It's about the value of the trees and what they mean to the economy, what they do as air filters, what they do as soil filters. Turf and shrubs are part of that, but filtering storm water runoff and putting oxygen back into the air and just creating a cleaner and healthier environment, all of those things are part of what trees do for us.
Discuss your tree farm operation?
We've got eight guys working for us. The farm's on 23 acres. If we had every spot filled, we'd be pushing 16,000 to 17,000 trees here. A lot of people think that sounds big, but it's small as far as tree farms go, and it's enough to keep us busy.
We probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 different species of trees that we grow. The most popular, I don't know that there's one, but certainly maples and oaks and magnolias we grow and sell in abundance. They're just kind of staples of the landscape industry.
There's a lot of the conifers people use a lot for different reasons. And then we do some unusual stuff. The one specialty crop that we grow and I think we're pretty well known for across the Southeast is our native azaleas. We grow them in larger containers than anybody else I know of, and we probably have 2,500 native azaleas at any given time. It's a really good item for us.
What do you enjoy the most about your work?
I guess at the risk of sounding a little bit philosophical, I enjoy the people that we work with more than anything else. Certainly, plants don't complain, so they're not hard to deal with. And we've got good employees.
But you just feel like at the end of the day you've accomplished something. You've contributed to helping make something better out there, either aesthetically or functionally by adding trees back into some raw landscape that got run over by the bulldozers.
But it's the people, really. The guys I know in the landscape business, the other arborists I come in contact with, are just really first-rate people.
A lot of businesses are in competition with each other. They can be kind of ugly and cutthroat. You don't share information. But in this business, we share information all the time. And we share customers all the time. If I don't have it, I'll send them to somebody else up the road 30 miles that I know does have it. And they'll do the same back to us.
BIO
Name: Paul Chappell
Age: Turns 59 on Monday
Hometown: Hampton, Ga.
Current residence: Pine Mountain, Ga.
Education: 1974 graduate of Henry County High School; earned bachelor's degree in education from Atlanta Christian College (now Point University) in 1978; earned master's of divinity degree from Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City, Tenn., in 1982
Previous jobs: Has worked with landscape companies and was on the horticulture staff at Callaway Gardens for about eight years prior to launching Diversified Trees with partner and fellow arborist Cory Flynn
Family: Wife of 37 years, Beth, and three grown children -- Laura, Marshall and Emily
Leisure time: Enjoys playing the guitar with friends, freshwater fishing and traveling
This story was originally published October 03, 2015 12:00 AM.