Tree Service in Hough, WA

Walk the blocks west of Main and you keep finding the same thing: a fifty-foot lot with a forest tree standing in it. Somebody planted a sequoia, a deodar cedar or a Douglas fir as a yard specimen back when the house was new, and the house never grew. The tree did.

That accounts for a large part of what we do in Hough. The rest is what happens to a big tree after it has changed hands three or four times and nobody has been up in it since.

A Forest Tree on a City Lot

An open-grown conifer is a different animal from one that came up inside a stand. It keeps its low limbs, builds weight far out along them, and loads a lot of leverage onto a root plate with a driveway on one side and a foundation on the other. Sequoias and deodars in particular carry enormous mass and shed limbs that are trees in their own right. There is no version where we trim one down to a comfortable size — reduce a conifer past a point and you have started a decline you pay for later. The real options are to prune it properly and watch it, or take it out.

Rentals, Absentee Owners and Thirty Years of Nothing

A lot of Hough housing is cut-up old houses, duplexes and small apartment buildings, and plenty of it is owned by somebody who never drives past. Deferred is the normal condition of those trees: heavy deadwood hanging over a public sidewalk, bigleaf maples carrying two codominant stems with the bark buried in the union, ivy run to the first limbs so nothing underneath can be inspected. Tenants notice and owners decide, so we will walk it with whoever is there and put what we found in writing for whoever signs.

New Construction Kills Old Trees on a Delay

Infill is constant here — lot splits, accessory dwellings, townhomes going in behind an existing house. What that does to a mature tree stays invisible for a while. A utility trench cut through one side of the root plate, a summer of equipment parked over the roots, six inches of new grade piled against the trunk, and the tree looks fine for two more summers before it thins from the top down. By then the options have narrowed. If a project is starting on your lot, the moment to ask about the tree is while it is still a drawing.

• Sectional removal of oversized firs, cedars and sequoias with no drop zone available
• Crane-assisted removals where a tree sits between a house and a neighbor with no rigging path out
• Deadwood and clearance pruning on long-neglected maples over sidewalks and parking areas
• Cabling and bracing for split-prone codominant stems worth keeping
• Written assessments for landlords, buyers and boards who need something on paper before deciding