Tim Butler is a doctor who makes house calls.
Butler, 37, cares for sick trees through his Mokena-based Tree Technology, which began with one truck in 1993 and now boasts a fleet of 17 trucks as well as 25 employees. He fields tree questions from as far away as Canada and the United Kingdom.
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Butler (right) lives in Peotone with his wife, Cathy, and their children Clarissa, 5; Jesse; 3, Casey, 2; and Colton, who was born March 2.
Q: How do you account for the rapid growth of your business?
A: We saw a big need in doing health care. It’s a niche that no one else fills. Most people know just enough to get them into trouble.
Q: Has the emphasis on the environment helped?
A: Yes. Regulations are changing. Now everybody’s environmentally conscious. It’s a sin now to go in and cut down a big stand of trees.
It (used to be) kind of like the old thing during the Civil War where if you got shot in the leg, they’d cut your leg off. If one tree was diseased, you’d cut it down and hope it didn’t spread to the rest. But you can’t replace a 24-inch-diameter tree with a 3-inch one.
Q: What kind of health care does a tree need?
A: We kind of relate it to human health. You go to the doctor and tell him all your symptoms. What we do is go out and take samples from the plant itself. We’ll go out and look at the structural integrity of the tree. We know what a healthy, normal plant needs to function. People tend to forget the most important thing, which is the root system.
The bigger (a tree) gets, the more food it needs to make for itself. All those (nutrients) may not be in the soil.
Trees can get some kind of bacteria, fungus or virus that clogs the circulatory system. It’s all broken down into microbiology. We have antibiotics, fungicides. We have an injection capsule that looks like a big hypodermic.
Q: Do you work on healthy trees too?
A: We do a lot of dormant tree pruning. We do pre-construction consultations. We consider environmental conditions. We tell (contractors) how to build so the trees won’t die.
Q: What do you charge for your services?
A: Anywhere from $50 for one (tree) to $2,500 for quite a few.
Q: What’s the most unusual assignment you’ve had?
A: We’ll get calls to rescue animals (trapped in trees), not just cats. We rescued an iguana at the University of Chicago last fall. The iguana was about 4 feet long. It was in the quad area, where we couldn’t get a truck in. The tree had to be climbed.