With a love of the outdoors and a passion for trees, Donald Picker, managing director of Asia Tree Preservation, is ideally suited to caring for the environment
I always had a love of the outdoors and it became evident early on that I wasn't going to be sitting behind a desk for great lengths of time. I grew a garden as a young boy and was also interested in trees.
I had always been involved in one way or another with green industries and throughout my school years I was doing work at my wife's family's tree nursery, planting, drawing plans and landscaping. A natural knack for climbing made tree work ideal for me. After graduating in linguistics and social research, I went to work for a tree company. Even before college, my climbing skills landed me a position at a power utility company, building power lines. I was climbing towers and constructing things in the air, which was a practical job that made me a lot of money because of dangerous practices, but the same union that was building power lines was also helping to clear them of tree branches, so I moved on to pruning trees.
Generally, if you work as a tree worker, you either work on the ground or on the tree. You have to climb the tree and prune it. From there I rediscovered tree climbing. My experiences as a utility worker gave me an education on careful practices for climbing trees, and I learned more from an entrepreneurial approach when in 1984 I started my own tree-care company known as Picker Tree Experts in the Chicago region. I then became a certified arborist and have remained a practising one.
On any given day, I might be talking to the manager of a grounds or property or a developer who is trying to preserve the trees on a site as they figure out how to build around trees. I might meet with an architect or grounds manager who is trying to understand how we preserve trees. The next day, I might get into that same tree that we were discussing and actually do the pruning. I may have to go to places like Hong Kong Golf Club to discuss with the grounds people how to bring in more light and brighten up a tee area.
I tell my workers to continue what I started, giving them the basic information. I provide training for apprentice tree workers and conduct assessments on trees considered potentially dangerous.