We prove that for every path $P$, the class of graphs with no induced $P$ and no induced four-cycle $C_4$ is linearly $χ$-bounded. More generally, we ask for which pairs $\{T,H\}$ where $T$ is a forest and $H$ is a complete multipartite graph, every graph $G$ with no induced $T$ and no induced $H$ has chromatic number at most $C \cdot R(α(H),ω(G)+1)$ for some constant $C$ depending only on $T$ and $H$, where $R(\cdot,\cdot)$ denotes the usual Ramsey numbers. We show that this holds in the following two instances, which strengthen the case $T=P$ and $H=C_4$ mentioned above: (1) every component of $T$ is a broom and $H$ is complete multipartite; or (2) $T$ is a forest and $H$ is complete bipartite. These two unify and substantially extend a number of previous results on linear and polynomial $χ$-boundedness for various graph classes. For case (2), we also provide a new proof (with better bounds) of a recent result of Fox, Nenadov, and Pham on the existence of an induced copy of a fixed tree in a graph satisfying certain sparsity conditions.