Chris May is owner of May Horticultural Services, Inc. where he practices his trade as a professional horticulturist, certified arborist (ISA #177983) & commercial applicator (BU10246), designer, and garden consultant with 20+ years of trade experience in institutional, estate, and farmstead properties. As a past nurseryman with Princeton Nurseries, he has a solid field production growing background with the myriad of Zone 6 woody plants. Chris is also a graduate of Longwood Garden’s Professional Gardener Training program where he was technically apprenticed as a traditional gardener/horticulturist in all areas of a world-class, public display garden.
A childhood of hiking and backcountry camping in western Maryland and West Virginia shaped Chris as a forester & naturalist and leads him now as a landscape contractor and residential designer. Along the way in his career, nurserymen, public gardeners, and farmers have helped to inform in him a sense of in-situ practical plant knowledge and ornamental design in a way that crosses boundaries. This personal background has been driving his professional efforts to bring natural design into a patchwork of local Buck County gardens and micro-restoration work along the Tohickon, Delaware, & Schuylkill.
Chris May’s civic side finds him as the current chairman of the Shade Tree Commission for the Borough of Doylestown, where he has lived and been council-appointed member for more than 10 years. Fifth Saturday’s, Maple Sugaring events, and other holidays, you will see him giving tours of the almost 30 acre arboretum at the Doylestown Cemetery, as a consulting staff arborist. So at any given time in town, Chris could be handing out trees from the Borough for Arbor Day, cruising through town evaluating tree permits and educating residents about their canopy, evaluating land development projects for Borough ordinance, proposing locations for the almost 100 new street trees each year, giving tree tours in the cemetery, or as periodic guest radio host on ‘Into the Garden’ – WDVR 89.7 out of Sergeantsville, NJ.
Chris tries to balance these roles with his first priority as a partner & father of two daughters on the east side of Doylestown, where he gardens 1/3 acre with a pocket wet meadow, vegetable garden, wood shed, and chicken run.
Professional Associations
International Society of Arborists (ISA): #177983
PENN Del:#1719a
Home Improvement Contractor (HIC): #PA089061
Business Pesticide License: BU10246
Commercial Applicator: #138088
MD Tree Expert: #1960