Tree Service in Edmonds, WA

Edmonds runs downhill to salt water, and the last stretch of that drop is a bluff that has been moving, slowly, for as long as people have been building above it. Almost every serious tree question in this town eventually runs into that fact.

A Bluff Tree Is a Slope Question Before It Is a Tree Question

The bluff above the tracks is layered glacial deposits — permeable sand and gravel sitting on dense silt and till. Winter rain soaks down through the loose material, reaches the tight layer, turns sideways and comes out at the face. That is what pulls material off the slope, and why the rail line below has such a long record of being closed by mud.

The instinct on ground that is moving is to take the trees off it. Sometimes that is right and often it is backwards. Roots hold surface soil together and a canopy intercepts a real share of the rain before it hits the ground, so stripping a bluff crest bare can leave you a wetter slope and a clean fetch for the next northwesterly. The question is which trees, not how many.

• Which trees are loading the slope and which are holding the surface together
• Whether a lean is old growth response or something that moved recently
• Where the water is coming from, including roof and driveway runoff nobody thinks about
• What can come out without opening a hole for the wind to work in
• Whether a geotechnical engineer belongs in this before anybody starts a saw

Madrona Does Not Behave Like the Rest of the Canopy

Madrona holds the exposed faces and bluff edges here, and it is the tree most often misread. It resents root disturbance, drops large limbs in dry summer weather for reasons that have nothing to do with wind, and has been declining along this shoreline for years with cankers and dieback. You do not prune one the way you prune a maple, and you do not clear the ground out from under one and expect it to shrug.

Small Lots, Oversized Conifers, No Way In

In the Bowl and through Seaview the problem is different. These are modest mid-century lots planted with cedar, Douglas fir and deodar cedar set close to foundations when they were the size of a shrub. They stand eighty and ninety feet now, with a house on one side, a fence on the other and no gate a chipper fits through. That is a crane job or a long week of rigging over a roof.

View Work Without Topping

People buy in Edmonds for the water and the Olympics, and screening closes a view a foot at a time. Reopening it properly means windowing and crown reduction worked to a plan across the whole slope. Topping is the other option and it is a bad one: a topped fir on an exposed lot puts out weak, heavy regrowth on a stem already overloaded, which is how a view job turns into a removal later. A multi-day view corridor across a full property is worth our drive. A single window cut is not.

Edmonds also pays closer attention to trees on private property than most places we operate, and its code has been revised more than once. Near the bluff, critical-area and steep-slope provisions sit on top of the tree rules. Confirm what applies to your parcel with the City of Edmonds before you schedule work with anyone.