Tree Service in Tam O’Shanter, WA

Tam O’Shanter sits on the shoulder between Longview and Kelso, and the planting looks like neither town. There is no street-tree rhythm, no matched row of one species down a block. Instead there are single large trees standing in the middle of lawns, and clumps of three or four set out together to shape something that is no longer there.

A Tree Grown in the Open Is Built Differently

A fir that comes up in the woods gets crowded, sheds its lower limbs and puts everything into height. A fir grown alone on mown grass keeps every limb it ever made. By the time it is mature it carries long, heavy, low laterals reaching sideways as far as it is tall, and all of that weight is cantilevered out over whatever got built underneath it later — a fence, a shed, a deck, a bedroom.

Spruce and the planted cedars are the same story with brittler limbs. The work is usually end-weight reduction rather than removal: shorten the reach on the heaviest laterals, clear the deadwood out of the interior, and get eyes on anywhere the tree grew two competing tops.

The Birch Are Not Going to Recover

Somebody should say this plainly. The white-barked European birch that went into yards all over this hill are, as a group, finishing up. The pattern is always the same — thinning from the top down, dead twigs in the upper crown, sparse yellowish foliage in July, then bark that starts flaking off in patches. Once borers are into a stressed birch, pruning does not turn it around and neither does watering, though watering earlier would have helped.

What we can do is tell you honestly which of yours has time left and which is already a liability over the patio, and take them out in stages rather than all in one bill. If a birch clump has one dead stem and two live ones, that is a legitimate reason to wait a year.

Narrow Gates, Sloped Lots and Whatever Is Buried Under the Grass

Almost everything here is a back-yard job behind a fence, on ground that slopes. That decides the method: brush comes out through a gate by hand, or the wood goes up and over the house with a crane set in the street. Stump grinding has the same problem, since a machine that will not fit a garden gate is no use to anybody, and a grinder working across a slope has to be set up rather than just driven.

There is also the buried inheritance. Old irrigation mains, valve boxes and drain tile from the course days run through some of these yards, unmapped and forgotten until a grinder finds them. We locate what we can and grind carefully near anything we cannot rule out.