Stump Grinding in Shiloh Park, Old Hickory

Half these stumps are not on anybody's deed

Shiloh Park is a mixed development - single-family houses and attached condominium buildings sharing the same ground off Matterhorn, Rainer and Blue Ridge Drive. That mix is pleasant to live in and confusing to hire contractors for, because a good share of the trees stand on association common area rather than in anyone's yard.

So the call we get here usually starts with frustration rather than a stump. Somebody has been told to talk to the board, the board has been told the homeowner should handle it, and meanwhile a silver maple stump has sat in the lawn behind a building for eight months collecting mower scars. Untangling that is genuinely part of the job here, and it goes faster than people expect once somebody asks the right question.

Work out who signs, then everything else is easy

The question is not whose yard it is, it is what the plat says and who maintains it. If the stump stands on common ground, the association orders the work and one invoice covers it. If it is inside a deeded house lot, that owner orders it. Where a condominium building's lawn is concerned it is almost always the association.

We are happy to write the quote either way and send it to a board member directly, with photographs and a scope they can put in front of the group. What we will not do is grind on common area on one resident's say-so, because that drops you into a dispute you did not need. A single phone call to whoever handles maintenance settles it in a morning.

1980s trees on Shiloh Park's shared lawns

The development dates from the 1980s into the 90s and the planting reflects it: silver maple and red maple through the lawns, Bradford pear near the drives, loblolly pine around the building edges. The maples are the ones lifting walkway sections and buckling asphalt at the parking bays, because surface roots in a mown lawn have nowhere else to go.

The pines are the other regular. They drop limbs onto parked cars, and when they finally come out the stumps are shallow but resinous. Pine grindings mat into a dense wet layer that smothers turf, so on common lawn we haul rather than spread. A bare patch in a shared lawn is exactly the sort of thing that turns up in the next set of board minutes. Bradford pear near the drives is the third recurring item, and here the complication is asphalt rather than turf: the pears were planted in cut-outs at the bay ends, and a stump in a pavement cut-out has to be taken below the base course so the patch does not settle into a puddle within a year.

Several stumps at once is how this should be done

Because the ground is shared, the sensible approach in Shiloh Park is to deal with stumps in a batch rather than one at a time as each becomes somebody's problem. A walk-around with whoever handles maintenance, a numbered list with photographs, one price for the lot.

That is substantially cheaper per stump than four separate call-outs across a year, and it means the machine crosses the common lawn once instead of four times. We provide before-and-after photos for the association's records, which most boards want anyway, and we schedule around resident parking rather than assuming the bays will be empty. Twelve minutes from the Village, and we would far rather make that drive once for six stumps than six times for one.