Frances, Jeanne Beget Tree Hugger
Remember those two hurricanes last year that turned your yard into a mocha slushee and how your poor trees toppled without a fight, their root discs tilted grotesquely to the sky?
Tim R. remembers ruefully, that is to say with extra helpings of rue both because he had recently planted 10 trees in his yard (live oak, key lime, and cypress), and because as general manager of a landscaping service, he’s the guy you call if you want your own trees hurricane proofed.
“When you saw your trees braced with boards, that was the work of a two or three man crew – it’s expensive,” he said. “Figure one man hour per tree plus materials and profit.”
In short, while company crews were busy with client calls and Labor Day storm bearing down, Tim did what the rest of us did: He joined the mobs clamoring to get into Lowe’s and Home Depot.
“I had these young trees that needed bracing,” he said. “I figured the stores would sell some kind of pre-fab bracing.”
They didn’t.
“It was embarrassing,” said Tim, a Chinese linguist for the Navy, and later, a NASA translator and cofounder of a language software company (he is also fluent in German and Spanish). “I had put up all these shutters to protect my house, and had taken no precautions to protect my trees or my house from the older trees growing near the house.”
His trees came through Francis in good shape, but Jeanne couped their gras but good. “By dawn I had lost 11 trees. It broke my heart.”
One of his older trees ruined his patio roof. Over Christmas he brooded, thinking.
“Landscapers install made to fit bracing supports,” he explained. “You need a miter saw and two by fours; metal banding, straps, and burlap. Besides expensive, it’s impractical for emergency situations.”
What was needed, he saw with 20-20 hindsight, was a tree bracing system that was cheap, strong, and could be installed on small to medium trees. Tim developed the Tree Hugger, an adjustable one-size-fits-most bracing system that he figures to sell in the $35- $50 range. His conceptual model is three-fifths the size of the final product. “The Tree Hugger consists of three five-foot extruded aluminum struts and an adjustable collar,” he said. “The system works for trees 2 ½ inches to 6 inches in diameter.”
The collars are made of industrial strength rip-stop fabric that will not rot. The struts have hinged feet for stability and the tops snap into waist-high polyethylene mounting posts in the collar.
“I thought it important to design a device that could be installed by one person with no tools, just fingers, and in five minutes,” Tim said. But first, he started a patent search. “If somebody else was already making a device to protect trees from storms, I wanted to buy it,” he said. “There’s nothing, no patents, so I went ahead and applied for a patent.”
As a language software developer in Washington where he not only patented products but took them to market, he knows what it takes to get a product on the shelves. Which is why he wants no part of that, let somebody else do it.