Josué Poulain

PJ Espaces Verts is a sole trader and one pair of hands. Josué Poulain answers the phone, comes out to price the job, and does the work. There is no team discovering the site on the morning, and no subcontractor sent at the last minute: the person who looked at the tree with you is the one who climbs it.

The business has been on the national companies register since September 2008 and has traded in its present form since May 2014, from Lapalud, in the Grèzes Basses quarter. It is registered under activity code 81.30Z — landscaping services — and employs no staff. That is not an organisational footnote: it is what caps the number of jobs in a week, and why a quote is booked a few days ahead.

Most of the work is done on ropes. Climbing rather than lifting is what makes it possible to work on a tree hemmed in by a house, a terrace or a pool, where no machine would fit, and it avoids tearing up the ground around it. It is also the technique that forces you to read the tree before cutting it: you do not take a fifteen-metre specimen apart section by section without knowing where it carries its weight.

The working area is a thirty-kilometre radius around Lapalud, across four departments: the northern Vaucluse, the Drôme provençale, the Gard rhodanien and southern Ardèche. Twenty-eight towns, two banks of the Rhône that do not carry the same species, and a mistral that throws trees off balance always from the same side. That ground — not a manual — is what feeds what is written on this site.

What he publishes here answers the questions that come back job after job, the ones answered ten times a year on the phone: what the law actually requires, what makes one quote four times another, and what costs more to repair than to avoid.