Use your great-grandfather's pole saw. Not his software.
The craft's tools are timeless — a sharp hand saw, a trained eye, Alex Shigo in a folding chair watching wood decay and rethinking an entire industry. The software handed to arborists is not.
It was built to dispatch crews, route trucks, and chase invoices — field-service plumbing with a tree logo bolted on. None of it was built for the actual work: the looking, the diagnosis, the record that has to follow a tree across decades and owners.
Keep the old tools. Retire the old software.
So we're building the opposite — and we're building it with the few arborists who already feel the gap.
Credentials aren't a tax. They're the point.
ISA certification and real Tree Risk Assessment frameworks — TRAQ, the published methodology, the matrix — aren't bureaucracy. They're how you look a homeowner in the eye and say this tree stays, or this one's a genuine hazard, and have the documentation to stand behind either call.
The tool is built around that. Your reports rise from Condition Report to ISA Assessment to TRAQ Risk Attestation as you earn the credentials — rigor is rewarded, not formatted around.
A removal should be a diagnosis — not a sales target.
Most tree work makes its money on the chainsaw; the incentive runs toward the cut, and the equipment payment behind it. Done right, the science runs the other way — it defends the tree that can be saved and stays honest about the one that can't. We don't bank a tree's life against a truck payment.
A medical record for trees.
The tree is the patient. The homeowner is the caretaker. The arborist is the specialist. The product is ArbKeep: one chart per tree, kept by the arborist, shared with the homeowner — every photo, finding, lab result, and invoice a single thread that follows the property, not the person.
Phone in the field. iPad on the tailgate. Laptop at the kitchen table. The whole history from your shirt pocket. It's early, and it's real — used on live trees every week.
Built inside a real practice, on a real street.
Every feature earns its place on actual trees before it ships. The proving ground is Upper Arlington Tree Co. in Upper Arlington, Ohio — plant health care, soil diagnostics, root-collar work, a four-season Tree Steward program. The software is whatever that practice actually needs, and nothing it doesn't.
And it's grounded in real rigor. The person building it co-authored a peer-reviewed study with Ohio State University (PLOS ONE, 2021) on recovery deserts — places where the need was real but the data lived only in the heads of the people doing the work, so the pattern was invisible to whoever walked up next and asked, "is there a problem here?" Trees have the exact same gap. This is the layer that closes it.
Research-lab rigor with neighbor proximity — leaning on land-grant extension labs, university pathology clinics, and ISA standards, not on a sales deck.
What does a homeowner actually walk away with today?
A conversation. Maybe a great one — a real arborist, standing under the tree, telling them what's wrong and what to do.
Then it's gone. No notes that mean anything. No seasonal plan to follow, because they never got it. Next year they can't remember what was treated, whether it worked, or what to do differently. The person who cares most about that tree — the one who lives with it — is left holding nothing.
That's not the arborist's fault. There's just nowhere to put it.
ArbKeep is the somewhere. The arborist's judgment stops evaporating — it becomes a record the homeowner can hold, act on, and learn from. And it follows the tree: to the next owner, the next arborist, to anyone who comes after and would make a better call if they could only see what came before.
A chart for every tree isn't paperwork. It's a trust layer — between the arborist who tends the tree, the homeowner who lives with it, and everyone who comes after.
We're looking for a few of you.
Not a customer list — a founding heartwood. The small, dense core this whole thing is built around: arborists shaping the tool to spec while running their own practice and keeping every dollar of it. We'd rather build with ten of the right people than sell to a thousand of the wrong ones.
If you run your own practice, read the journals, and you're done duct-taping a spreadsheet, a Word template, ChatGPT, and iMessage into a system — and especially if you also write code, design, or do marketing — you'd be building this with us, not just using what we hand you.
Modern tools for the modern arborist.
Built by the ones doing the work. By invitation — applications open.
Apply to join Heartwood →
David All · Arborist in Upper Arlington, Ohio — by way of heritage apple orchards in Pennsylvania and old-growth conifers on the Olympic Peninsula. Builder of ArbKeep and CanopyKeep. Featured in The Guardian. Ohio Chapter ISA member · Upper Arlington Tree Co.