About The Twig Smith
The hands, the eye, and the person who shows up.
I’m Ian. When you book The Twig Smith, you’re not hiring a crew you’ve never met — you’re hiring a tradesperson who reads a plant before he ever makes a cut.
Learned by doing — hedge after hedge, tree after tree.
This started as hands-on work, not a business plan. I’ve shaped more hedges than I can count — tight boxwood borders, laurel and privet, and cedar walls run ten feet tall — and pruned tree after tree across Greater Victoria. That kind of repetition is its own teacher: you learn how each plant grows, where it wants to be cut, and exactly what a rushed job costs three seasons down the line.
A background in forestry surveying, out in the working woods, gave me the eye before the shears ever did — reading structure, load and shape at a glance. That’s what I bring to a hedge in Oak Bay or a heritage fruit tree in Gordon Head: the patience to see the finished line before I make the first cut. The Twig Smith is where all of that meets your garden gate.
That’s the difference between someone who cuts a hedge and someone who shapes one. I read structure first, and every cut has a reason — the health of the plant and the clean line it leaves behind, never the speed of the job.
- Countless hedges shaped — boxwood, laurel, privet & cedar
- Hands-on tree & fruit-tree pruning, season after season
- Forestry surveying background in the working woods
- Local & owner-operated across Greater Victoria
- Every cut made for the plant’s health & a clean finished line
Beyond the hedge line
The work funds a bigger pursuit — and the pursuit sharpens the work.
Away from the garden, I’m a mountaineer. It’s the long game of my life: a progression up through the classic North American and alpine objectives toward the 8,000-metre giants. The business and the mountains aren’t separate stories — they run on the same fuel.
The patience a summit demands — the attention to a single detail, the refusal to rush a system that has to hold — is exactly the discipline I bring back down to the hedge line. Precision at altitude, precision on your cedar wall: same craftsman, same standard.
So every tidy garden is a step toward a summit. When you back The Twig Smith, you’re backing a craftsman who treats your property with the same precision the mountains require of him.
- Mt. Baker3,286 m
- Mt. Rainier4,392 m
- Mt. Robson3,954 m
- Aconcagua6,961 m
- The Matterhorn4,478 m
- The 8,000ersthe horizon