Stump Grinding in Lakewood Heights, Old Hickory TN

The Bradford pear trees are failing in the same three years

Lakewood Heights went in around 1996, and like nearly every mid-90s subdivision in Middle Tennessee it was landscaped with Bradford pear. Those trees carry a structural life of roughly twenty-five to thirty years. We are well past that now.

The failure is predictable and it is working its way street by street along Rifle Range Road, Pitts Avenue and Elliott Drive. The tree splits down the middle where every limb leaves the trunk at the same height, usually under an ice load or in a hard summer squall, and the two halves fall in opposite directions. What is left is a low, wide stump with a hollowing centre, and quite often a second and a third exactly like it in the same yard, because they all went in together.

No gate on the golf course side

The lots backing onto Hermitage Golf Course have no rear access at all. No alley, no service road, and the fairway is not a route - nobody is driving a grinder across mown turf somebody else maintains, and you should be wary of anyone who offers to.

So everything comes out through the side yard, and on these houses that side yard contains an air conditioner pad, a downspout, a meter and usually a corral for the garbage cans. We measure the narrowest point and pick the machine to suit. Where the gap defeats even the narrow unit, the honest answer is hand work with a saw and a mattock, priced by the hour, and we tell you that before you have taken a day off work for it. The other thing worth checking before we come is the fence itself. Late-90s privacy panels along these back lines have often had a rail rot out, and a gate that has not been opened since the pears were planted may not survive being forced. We can lift a panel cleanly and reset it, which is quicker than repairing a split post.

Doing four pear stumps in one morning

Pear stumps are the good news in all this. The wood is soft, the root plate is shallow and modest, and a typical one measures fifteen to eighteen inches across at the cut. On open ground each is fifteen or twenty minutes of actual cutting.

Which makes setup and walking the real cost. If you have four of them and we can thread one route through the side yard, the per-stump price drops sharply against doing them one at a time over four visits. The same holds across a street. If your neighbour lost theirs the same winter, mention it - we will happily do both houses on one trip and both of you pay less for it.

Willow oak and Leyland cypress are the other two stumps

The builder's second choice around here was willow oak, and those are only now reaching size. Dense wood, long fine roots, slow feed. A mature willow oak stump is an entirely different afternoon from a pear and prices like the hardwood it is.

Leyland cypress is the third. Planted as a quick screen along back fences in the late 90s, it is now either sixty feet tall and leaning or dying in patches from canker. The stumps are shallow and easy, but the resin gums the wheel and the grindings mat into a wet felt that will smother grass if it is left spread. On cypress we normally recommend hauling the material off rather than raking it back in. Whatever comes out, we backfill and firm the spot rather than leaving a soft crater that collapses under a mower wheel in June.