Tree Service in Father Blanchet Park, WA

A lot of the trees that cause arguments out here went in as screening, right on the property line: arborvitae down the side, a Leyland cypress or two at the back corner, a laurel hedge along the rear fence. All of it four feet tall the year the subdivision was new. Four decades on it is thirty or forty feet of unmanaged evergreen with the trunks pressed into a fence and an owner on each side.

Hedges That Quietly Turned Into Trees

Arborvitae and Leyland cypress do not fail the way a fir fails. They splay. A row nobody has touched grows several stems from low on the trunk, those stems lean away from each other under wet snow or a glaze of ice, and once they have opened out they never stand back up. What was a screen becomes a line of half-fallen stems resting on a fence panel never built to hold anything.

How much can be saved depends on how far it went. Stems that only tipped can sometimes be cabled together and thinned so they carry less next time. Once the bark has torn at the base, the conversation is removal and what replaces it — a Leyland cypress is not a hedge, it is a large tree being asked to behave like one.

• Overgrown arborvitae and Leyland cypress rows removed along a shared fence line
• Laurel and photinia cut back to a height you can maintain from the ground
• Birch and flowering plum from the original landscaping, at the end of their run
• Back-yard removals where every stick is hand-carried through a side gate

When the Trunk Sits on the Line

In Washington a tree whose trunk straddles a boundary is generally treated as belonging to both owners, and neither one gets to remove it alone. A tree standing entirely on one side belongs to that owner even when most of the canopy hangs over the neighbor. Our position is simple: we will not cut a shared tree on one owner’s say-so. Where the line itself is unclear, that is a survey question and not a tree question. Where it is clear and both households agree, the work is easy.

What the Builder Planted in the Strip

The other repeat call is the street trees that went in when the plat was signed — flowering plum, ornamental pear, sweetgum and green ash in a strip a few feet wide between sidewalk and curb. Plum and pear are short-lived, and this side of town is full of them at the age where limbs start leaving the canopy without being asked. Who owns them depends on whether that strip is public right-of-way, an association tract, or your own frontage. Those rules are not the same inside the city as in unincorporated Clark County, and they change, so we check what applies to your address before quoting.