Tree Service in Mountain View, WA

Callery and flowering pear went into east Vancouver by the thousand, and Mountain View took its share. They were cheap, they grew fast and they flowered on schedule. What nobody mentioned in 1985 is that most of them were grown with two or three stems leaving the trunk at the same height, bark pinched in between, and that union is exactly where they come apart.

So the call we take most on these blocks is the same one every time: half a tree lying in the driveway after a wind night, and a homeowner asking whether the other half is coming too. Often enough, it is.

Everything on Your Street Went In the Same Spring

Uniform planting looks tidy for about twenty-five years. After that it means uniform failure. Streets around Mountain View High School and off SE 136th went in as complete packages — same species, same nursery, same year — so when one tree on a cul-de-sac starts shedding limbs, the neighbors are two seasons behind it. If you have four aging trees, we would rather tell you which one goes first and what can safely wait.

The Wind That Does Damage Here Comes Out of the East

Most of Washington braces for a southwest storm. East Vancouver gets a second problem the coast does not: cold air pouring out of the Columbia Gorge, arriving from the opposite direction. A tree that spent forty years laying down wood against the prevailing wind has nothing built on that side. Add freezing rain glazing the crown and you get failures on a night with barely any rain in the forecast. The calls we take in a December east-wind event look nothing like the ones we take in November.

• Flowering and Callery pear splitting at a tight, included-bark union
• Sweetgum roots lifting sidewalk panels and driveway aprons on the older streets
• Silver and Norway maple planted a few feet off a foundation, now well over the roof
• Leyland cypress and arborvitae screens that have outgrown their root plates
• Birch and flowering plum thinning out after a run of dry Augusts
• The occasional leftover Douglas fir on a larger parcel, taller than everything around it

Screens That Turned Into Trees

Leyland cypress and emerald arborvitae get planted three feet apart to block a neighbor, and for a decade they do the job well. Then they reach thirty-odd feet on a root plate sized for a hedge, shade each other out from the inside, and start leaning as a group. Once a run has gone brown on the interior it will not fill back in, and shearing the tops off leaves a wall of dead sticks. The honest fix is usually to take the run out and replant something that stays the height you wanted.