Melvyn Gomez turned weekend tree jobs into Garden Oaks Tree Service
Melvyn Gomez took small tree jobs on weekends until the calls outgrew his day job, and his Houston crew now prunes for homeowners, neighborhood associations and a water district.
Houston, TX
The cat had been stuck high in a tree at an apartment complex for about a week. One resident had called everyone they could think of before the fire department suggested trying a tree-climbing service. The crew that answered came out late on a Saturday evening, the resident wrote afterward in a Google review, and climbed up to help get the cat down, even though rescuing cats was not one of the services the company offered.
Those climbers worked for Melvyn Gomez, whose Houston company was called MG2 Tree Service at the time and is now Garden Oaks Tree Service. Cats are not its usual work. Most days the crew prunes oaks and pines for homeowners, takes down trees that storms drop on houses and driveways, or keeps up the trees for neighborhood associations and a water district.
Gomez built the business one side job at a time, while he was still working for another tree company. “I started doing small jobs on the side during the weekends, and I started getting more phone calls, and customers referred me to other customers,” he says. “I ended up getting more work, and then I quit the job that I had.”
The first customer reviews of his crew date to 2021. He registered MG2 Tree Service LLC with the state in 2022 and changed the name to Garden Oaks Tree Service in 2024, keeping the same north Houston address and phone number. Under both names, customers describe the same habit. The owner comes out to give the estimate himself, and then he explains the tree.
One homeowner first met the crew at an office complex where it was working and asked whether it did houses, too. In 16 years in that house, the homeowner wrote, no tree service had ever explained what it was cutting and why. Gomez did. He went through how much of the oak could come off without stressing it, how to even out the weight for growth, which limbs were growing into others and pushing healthy branches down, and how far the canopy needed to stay from the roof. Another customer, who had lived in the same house for 35 years and hired many tree companies, wrote that it was clear Gomez loved his work when he came to make his estimate.
Oaks come up most often in the reviews, live oaks and water oaks among them, followed by pines. One customer’s cedar had been struck by lightning.
On removals, the crew works around whatever the customer wants to keep. For one customer, the crew cut down or trimmed more than 20 trees and ground at least 10 stumps, some of them by hand because they sat near sprinkler heads or a gas meter. Gomez also pulled ivy off the side of the house and out of the gutters and fixed a broken gate latch. To reach a 75-foot pine standing 6 feet from another house, the crew took down a fence and a swing set and put both back together afterward. A third customer wrote that the crew had her check the sprinkler system before they left, to make sure nothing was broken.
Storms bring a different kind of day. After one in 2023, a neighbor’s sweetgum fell across a customer’s driveway. The crew arrived at 8 a.m. and worked until about 4 p.m., the customer wrote, through scorching heat with a heat index of 113 degrees. In 2024 a tree fell on a house during a storm, and the crew removed it the next day. The job took six and a half hours, the homeowner wrote, and the crew did not break a window, damage the gutters or knock down the fence. Two customers wrote that Gomez answered their calls well after business hours. A third, cleaning up branches after a windstorm, had called a number of tree services and wrote that his was the only one that picked up on the first ring.
Neighborhood associations keep the crew busy. “We work for some of the HOA places doing pruning,” Gomez says. A resident of an 84-house homeowners association wrote that the crew showed up on a Monday and had finished pruning, trimming and chipping the neighborhood’s trees by the end of Wednesday. When a homeowner needed to replace a tree lost to bad weather, Gomez checked the association’s requirements first. In Cypress, the crew took out a dead live oak in the front lawn of a new house and planted another in its place. A 2025 meeting agenda for a Harris County water control and improvement district lists “tree maintenance matters, including status of removal of dead trees,” with Garden Oaks Tree Service named beside the item.
Gomez would like more commercial work. For now he does much of the office work himself. “Because it’s just me, I have to do everything: emails, phone calls, receipts, meet with the homeowners or with the people who’s in charge of the commercial places,” he says. When he is in a meeting with an association, the water district or a homeowner, he cannot take calls. “It’s a really small company,” he says.
The crew usually breaks for lunch from noon to 1 p.m. One customer, who had two huge trees removed and hauled away in a job that took all day, wrote that if they took a lunch break at all, it was a short one.
Gomez is plain about what working for himself costs. “It’s a little bit more work, more stress, no days off,” he says. “You got to work pretty much every day.”