Tree Service in Edgewood Park, WA

Clark County grew prunes and berries long before it grew subdivisions, and the tract streets through here went in over that ground in the decade after the war. Builders left what was convenient to leave. That is why a ranch house here so often has a gnarled plum, a walnut or a leggy apple behind the garage with a trunk twice the age of the foundation.

Everything else arrived with the first owners — a fir at the property corner, a silver maple for quick shade, a sweetgum in the planting strip, arborvitae along the fence. Sixty years on, the fruit trees are failing from old age and the planted ones are failing from success.

Gravel Under the Lawn Changes How a Tree Roots

The Vancouver plain is old flood deposit: sand and rounded gravel under a modest layer of workable soil. Roots spread wide and shallow because there is nothing below worth reaching for. In a wet stretch of winter that means a broad crown held up by a root plate sitting in soft ground, which is how a healthy-looking tree tips out of a flat lawn. In late summer it means the same shallow roots run dry faster than people expect in western Washington.

That summer stress is worth knowing about, because it does not look like storm damage. It shows up as early leaf drop, thinning at the top of the crown, and limbs letting go on hot, still afternoons with no wind involved at all. Big horizontal maple and walnut limbs are the usual candidates.

Orchard Wood Is Old Wood

The leftover fruit trees are worth keeping if you like them, and plenty of people here do. What they need is weight taken off the long horizontal limbs and the old decayed stubs cleaned up, in stages rather than all at once. What they do not need is somebody cutting the whole top out. When the trunk is hollow through and the bark is sloughing at the base, we will tell you it is finished rather than prune it for another two seasons.

Sixty-Foot Lots With an Arterial Out Front

Access here is mixed and it matters to the price. Blocks in the middle of the neighborhood are easy — park in front, carry through a side gate. Lots fronting Fourth Plain, Andresen or St Johns are a different job, because staging a chip truck on a busy arterial with a bus route means cones, a spotter and picking the right time of day. We work that out standing in the driveway, not over the phone.

• Removing tract-era silver maples that have split at a codominant fork
• Staged reduction on old prune, apple and walnut trees left over from the orchards
• Taking out declining birch and spruce planted along the front of the house
• Grinding sweetgum and maple stumps, including surface roots lifting a driveway apron
• Clearing overgrown arborvitae and laurel screens back off a fence line