Tree Service in Northwood, WA

Drive one of these streets in early spring and the flowering trees along the curb open within a week of each other. That is not coincidence. The blocks up here were platted, built and landscaped in single runs, so the trees out front went in the same season, at the same caliper, off the same nursery order. Thirty-odd years on, they are arriving at the same problems at the same time.

A Street Planted All at Once Ages All at Once

It catches people out. A neighbor loses a tree in a February blow, two more go over a few doors down the same month, and everybody decides the weather was freakish. Usually the weather was ordinary. The trees were the same age, the same species and the same size, rooted in the same shallow strip of soil, carrying the same structural fault they were sold with. So when we look at one tree on a Northwood block, we look up and down the street as well. The tree next door is a fair preview of what yours is going to do.

The Flowering Pears Are the Ones That Come Apart

Ornamental pear went into subdivisions of this era by the thousand, and it is the tree we get called to most up here. The fault is built into it — eight or ten limbs leaving the trunk within a foot of each other, pressed tight with bark trapped in the joins instead of wood grown across them. It holds for twenty years. Then a wet snow or a hard March wind tears out a third of the crown and lays it over the driveway. Once a lead has ripped out, the rest is rarely worth propping up. Green ash and sweetgum in the same strips fail differently and more slowly, from underneath, lifting walk panels and pushing the curb line out of true.

That Narrow Strip Between the Sidewalk and the Curb

There is not much soil in it. A tree sold as a street tree in the eighties was expected to live in a few feet of dirt with pavement on both sides, so the roots go wherever they can instead — under the walk, under the apron, along the water service. Ownership is not obvious either. Depending on the plat, that strip may be right-of-way, a tract held by an association, or plain private yard, and those rules differ by jurisdiction and get amended. Confirm it for your address before anyone sets a date.

• Reducing end weight on a pear or plum before the next wet snow finds the weak union
• Deadwood and roof clearance on the back-fence conifers left standing from the original plat
• Taking out a tree that has already split, and grinding the stump low enough to re-sod or replant
• Sidewalk, apron and curb conflicts where the roots have simply run out of room