Lion-tailing is the bad practice of stripping the inner limbs until the foliage sits in clumps at the tips, like a tail. The crew does not do it. The service that does the real crown work is tree trimming. People end up with lion-tails because someone cleaned the inside of the tree to make it look open, or because they thought a thinner tree meant no small branches. The weight moves to the ends. The limb is more likely to fail. The tree looks gutted.
Crown thinning is the cut they were trying to describe. Thinning opens the sail so wind can pass. It leaves inner wood. It does not skin every branch to a pom-pom. If a previous crew lion-tailed the oak, we will not match that shape on the next visit. We also will not top the tree, and we will not hurricane-cut a palm while we are refusing this.
What it looks like here
From the ground you see long bare branches with a knot of leaves at the end, and you can see too much sky in a way that does not look like a healthy open crown. The interior is empty. On a sandy lot those end-weighted limbs sit over a shallow root plate. That combination is the opposite of storm prep. A raised crown can still have inner branches. A reduced crown can still have inner branches. A lion-tail has neither.
Hedges get a cousin of this mistake when they are sheared only on the outside until the inside is dead. That is a hollow hedge, not a lion-tail, and it belongs to hedge trimming. Do not ask us to clean a viburnum the way a bad prune cleans an oak. Different plant, same impatience.
What we do about it
We decline the request, and we explain the cut we will do instead if the tree is worth keeping. Sometimes the lion-tail is already the structure, and the next visit can only stop making it worse. We will not promise to fill in a gutted crown by next month. New shoots at the tips are not a repair. If the tree is hollow as well as lion-tailed, removal is the honest word. Removal is a few hundred dollars to several thousand, by the tree, and the stump is extra. No tighter number is published.
If you were sold a lion-tail as a thinning, send the photo. We will name what we are looking at before anyone climbs. The trimming we do sell is tree trimming.