Tree Service in Walla Walla County, WA

Before anybody irrigated it, the Walla Walla Valley floor was bunchgrass and sagebrush with cottonwood and willow strung along the creeks. Every tree shading a street in town today is there because somebody planted it, staked it and kept water on it for a hundred years. That is the single most useful thing to know about tree work in this county.

A Big Old Town Canopy Coming Due

Walk the older residential grid around Whitman College and Pioneer Park and you are under silver maple, black walnut, Norway maple, honey locust, catalpa and a thinning stock of elm. Much of it went in across the same few decades, which means much of it is aging out across the same few decades. Silver maple gets enormous in this valley, sets included bark in its main unions, and starts dropping leads over roofs and sidewalks once the crown goes top-heavy.

One overmature maple is a local job and should stay one. Six of them on a church property, a school block or a winery drive, with a narrow street and a service line overhead, is a planned removal with rigging or a crane and several days on site. That difference is the whole reason we drive over.

Ten Miles East and You Are in Real Forest

Go up Mill Creek toward Kooskooskie, or out past Dixie, and the ground climbs into the Blue Mountains foothills. The species list changes completely — ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, grand fir, some larch on the north aspects. Precipitation rises with elevation, and so does fire exposure, because these are dry-site conifers standing over grass that cures brown by early summer.

Homes tucked into that transition carry a genuine wildland-urban interface problem: ladder fuel under the canopy, limbs into the eaves, dead standing pine left where it fell out of the row. Thinning and limbing that ground is real work with real value, and it schedules months ahead rather than tonight, which suits how we travel.

At the West End the Wind Does the Sorting

The lower county drops into shrub-steppe along the Columbia and the Snake, and Wallula Gap funnels wind through it hard. Trees at Burbank, Touchet and Wallula are irrigated plantings standing in open country with nothing upwind to slow anything down. They grow one-sided, they take sunscald on the southwest face of the trunk, and borers find the ones that get short-watered.

Vineyards and orchards run their own version of the problem. Shelter rows of poplar and Russian olive planted for wind protection eventually become the liability they were meant to prevent, and taking a failing row out without wrecking trellis, drip line or the crop under it is a sequencing job as much as a cutting job.

• Multi-tree removals in the older Walla Walla and College Place neighborhoods
• Winery, vineyard and farmstead shelterbelt clearing
• Crane-assisted removals where a street or courtyard leaves no drop zone
• Written tree risk assessments for schools, churches and commercial owners
• Fuel reduction around homes in the Blue Mountain foothills

Cities and Towns in Walla Walla County

Walla Walla, College Place, Waitsburg, Prescott, Burbank, Touchet and the smaller places between them each sit on a different piece of this valley, with a different species mix and different access. Pick yours for the local detail.