By Jim Cavan

Living on the Seacoast, we’re used to strange weather. Even when we momentarily find ourselves getting fed up with the ice and the sleet, the heat and the humidity, the rain and the rogue winds, we’re quick to remind ourselves: It’s New England. Wait five minutes.

But you’d be hard pressed to recall two summers more distant on the weather scale than the summers of 2009 and 2010.

While for most the schizophrenic summer sways of Mother Nature in New England simply mean waiting a few minutes – or changing vacation destinations – for Chris Kemp of Suntree Tree Health Care, it means a constantly shifting set of challenges for his business.

According to Kemp, last year’s unusually cool and rainy summer wasn’t just a drag for Seacoast residents; it helped create conditions that favored a lot of diseases and insects as well. “With the wet springs you worry more about the residual effects than anything,” explains Kemp. “Certain fungus diseases thrive in these kinds of conditions, and if it’s left untreated, it can persist through the following year.”

But unpredictable weather isn’t the only ‘X’ that Kemp and others in his industry constantly have to solve for. From blight and disease to insects and other vermin, there is no shortage of adversaries – or combination of adversaries – waiting in the wings beyond the weather.

As with businesses of all stripes, matters certainly haven’t been helped by the recession. Still, Kemp claims the toll the economic slowdown took on his company’s bottom line was much more apparent last year than this year.

“Things have been a lot steadier this year, for sure,” he said. “Mother nature certainly helped in jumpstarting the season.”

Then again, Kemp acknowledges part of the upswing in business can itself be attributed to the weather. While it’s been almost the exact opposite of what we came to expect through much of last summer – rain, rain and more rain – the dry, hot conditions of 2010 came on the heels of an untypically volatile spring.

“The big problem this past February was the early thaw and warming we had,” he said. “The ground got incredibly wet, and unusually saturated soils helped weaken the roots, especially of evergreens. So when we had the wind storms a few weeks later, trees were being uprooted all over the place.”

Kemp says matters were further exacerbated by the alarming extremes of this past spring – with 80 degree days in April becoming, for a time, the norm -- only to be followed by two days of freezing night temperatures which damaged the new, relatively succulent growth on the new leaves and shoots.

But while each season inevitably brings new surprises, Kemp is content to take it all in stride, and is concerned more than anything about touting his ever-growing green business practices as a way of separating himself from the herd.

That list is as long as it is impressive: any compostable waste taken from a jobsite is composted. The company uses biodiesel in all of its fleet vehicles as well biodegradable chainsaw oil. And Suntree advocates insect and disease programs that encourage less pesticide use and more preventative care.

Kemp is also currently researching new forms of non-chemical fungal and infectious resistance, where proactive organisms like certain kinds of beneficial bacteria can be employed to protect tree habitats from invasive blights and other maladies. While it sounds harmless, Kemp’s approach is quite revolutionary for an industry still mired in the chemical.

“Years ago it was conventional wisdom to just use fertilizers, but we’ve since figured out that’s not the best thing for trees, because they become dependent on it,” explains Kemp. “So now we’re trying to put more living stuff into the ground, more beneficial bacteria, and inoculating the soils around trees and shrubs like you’d find in a lot of undisturbed forests to create a more healthy balance.”

In an effort to further bolster and improve his green initiatives, in 2008 Kemp’s Suntree became one of the pioneering businesses to join the Green Alliance, a Seacoast-based “green business union” and discount member co-op which helps promote and raise the profile of sustainability-minded businesses throughout the region.

Still, for all his unique and green-minded approaches and initiatives, it’s perhaps in what he doesn’t do that is most admirable from a sustainability standpoint: In most cases, Chris chooses the decidedly more conservative approach to tree care, cutting down as few limbs as possible and using preventative methods whenever a problem is caught early enough, and always using chemical treatments with care and precision.

In the end, for Suntree, it’s all about promoting tree preservation, not removal, and promoting plant health care practices which best maximize overall tree health.

So while the oft-uncontrollable Mother Nature might provide as many business blessings as curses in his industry, Chris Kemp would just as soon stake the future success of Suntree on what he can control.

“We’re big on plant health care, and we’re always researching what’s going on in that growing field,” says Kemp. “Better quality soils that are more alive are better for your plants, so we’re trying to impart that with our methods.”

For more information about Suntree Tree Health Care, go to www.suntreecorp.com
To learn more about the Green Alliance, go to www.greenalliance.biz