Tree Service in Bennington, WA

Most of what we do in Bennington happens within ten feet of a fence. This part of east Vancouver filled in during the tract-building decades on flat ground with narrow side yards, so a tree that has reached size out here is close to a boundary whether anyone planned it that way or not.

The First Question Is Whose Tree It Is

The trunk decides. A stem standing entirely on your side of the line is your tree, with the bill and the liability attached. A trunk sitting across the boundary is generally treated as shared, which means neither household gets to make a removal decision on its own. Old fences do not always sit where the survey line is, either. We tell you what we see on the ground, and where real money or a disagreement is riding on it, get your own legal advice rather than taking a tree guy’s word for it.

In practice these usually end well. Both sides look at the same tree with the same person standing there, and the job gets quoted once instead of twice.

Cutting Back to the Line Is Allowed and Often Still Wrong

You can generally take back what hangs over your property, and you own the consequences if what you cut kills the tree. The trouble is that a hard vertical cut down one face of a canopy is close to the worst thing you can do to it. You strip a third of the leaf area off one side, leave a row of wounds in a single plane, and the regrowth comes back as weak upright shoots pointed straight at your roof. In five years the problem is bigger and less stable than it was.

There is nearly always a better version. Taking limbs back to live lateral branches instead of to an imaginary vertical plane keeps the tree balanced, gets you the clearance you actually needed, and does not turn the person next door into an opponent.

• Arborvitae and screening hedges planted on the line that now shade out one of the two yards
• Clearance pruning over a roof, a gutter run or a shared fence, cut to live laterals
• Removals where every piece has to be lowered into a strip of lawn between two houses
• Volunteer cherry, holly and laurel that seeded into the fence corner and are lifting panels
• Stump grinding tight against a fence footing, with depth planned around what is buried there
• Storm cleanup where a limb crossed the line and both households need the same photographs

The Tree Is Rarely the Hard Part. The Gate Is.

On a Bennington job the removal itself is usually straightforward. Getting the wood off the property is not. Side yards run three or four feet, gates are standard width, and the chip truck sits at the curb on a street with cars parked down both sides. Brush goes out by hand or on a rope, rounds come down in a size a person can carry, and we measure the narrowest opening on the property at the estimate — including the step, the meter, the downspout and the air conditioner the grinder has to get past.