Tree Service in Sightly, WA

A wooded lot in this county is really two layers, and only one of them ever gets any attention. The canopy is what people look at. The trouble is generally in the fifteen feet of green underneath it that arrived on its own and has been quietly winning ever since.

Ivy Takes a Fir Apart Slowly

English ivy is the most common thing we deal with on wooded lots in this county and the one people worry about least. Along the ground it is a nuisance. Up a trunk it becomes three problems at once: it adds weight and a great deal of sail area to a crown that was never built to carry either, it holds moisture against bark all year, and it hides the trunk, so the conk or the crack that would have told you the tree was failing sits under a foot of leaves where nobody can see it.

The fix is simple and slow. We cut a clean band through every vine at the base and clear the ground back a few feet so nothing climbs straight up again. The ivy above the cut dies over a season, dries, and comes down in pieces — which is why we tell people not to park under it in the meantime. What you should not do is haul a mature vine down off a tall trunk by hand. The bark comes with it.

Holly, Laurel and Everything Else That Filled In

Under the ivy, the understory in these pockets is mostly volunteers: English holly seeded in by birds, cherry laurel escaped from a hedge somebody planted generations ago, blackberry through every opening, vine maple wherever light gets down. On its own none of it looks like much. Together it becomes a wall — you cannot walk your own ground, you cannot see the base of your trees, and it grows straight up into the lower limbs, which is the route a fire on the ground takes into a canopy.

• Holly and laurel that resprout from the stump unless the cut is dealt with at the time
• Blackberry canes rooted at both ends, layering a few feet further out every year
• Brush grown up into the low branches of conifers standing over a deck or shop
• Old clearing slash left in piles from when the building site was pushed in
• A driveway narrowing season by season until a truck cannot get down it

It is honest to say up front that clearing this does not stay cleared. The first pass is the big one; keeping it that way afterward is a much smaller job, and one most people handle themselves.

The Line to Your House Runs Through Somebody Else’s Trees

Power reaches a pocket like this on a long overhead run through standing timber, feeding a handful of meters at the far end of it. When the lights go out here it is very often one tree on one span, and everybody stays dark until it is cleared. The clearing inside the utility easement is not yours to do — trees in it are Cowlitz PUD to manage, anything in contact with a conductor is theirs to make safe, and a downed line gets treated as live no matter what it looks like.

What is yours is the row of leaners standing just outside that easement, getting closer to it every winter. Those come down cheaply on a dry afternoon in advance, rather than at midnight in the rain behind forty other calls.

We are based in Kelso, minutes from here, and there is no travel charge for being off the main road. The estimate is a walk on the ground and it is free. You will also get told which of this can wait a couple of years, because most of it can.