Our History

Author: Craig Hayes

This company was started in 1973 by Bruce Hayes (my brother) and John Ehle. The original name was E&H Tree Service. I teamed with my brother for a short time under the name of Hayes Bros Tree Service. In 1977 I hired Fred Haefale, who worked for me for a year and a half. He had studied under Dr. Alex Shigo, chief scientist for the US Forest Service.

I took a workshop with Dr. Shigo back in the eighties where I met and became friends with Peter Wild who went on to start ArborJet, a company best known for making trunk injections the industry standard over spraying. His product, Tree-Age, is the industry leader for Emerald Ash Borer and other boring insects.

In 1981, I changed the name to Hayes Tree Service Inc. We grew to 20 employees and 10,000 active customers. In April 2007, I sold the company to Davey’s Tree Experts and retired.

With Emerald Ash Borer destroying Boulder’s urban forest, I decided to come out of retirement in 2014 and started Healthy Trees LLC to take on this new challenge.

I attended Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. In 1968, I was drafted in the Army and served in Korea as an MP. I went to graduate school at the American Graduate School of International Management, more commonly known as Thunderbird, in Phoenix, Arizona.