Root Removal in Ashland City, Tennessee

Why Root Removal Is Even Practical on the Flats

It works down here because of where the roots are. The seasonal water table sits close enough to the surface that anything much below eighteen inches is airless for part of the year, so a bottomland tree keeps its structural roots in the top foot of soil. That is a nuisance when they are tipping a walkway. It is a gift when you want them gone, because the whole system stays inside the reach of a grinding wheel rather than sitting where only an excavator could follow it.

On the cherty ridge soils above the square the arithmetic inverts. Roots there work down into joints and seams in the limestone, so they run narrower, deeper and in directions the surface of the lawn gives no clue about. Following one on Skyview or up in Oak Hills means probing rather than reading humps in the grass, and on those lots there is a point where the honest answer is that the remaining wood is wedged in rock and it is staying there.

So the first thing worth establishing about a root job here is which of the two you are standing on.

Shaving a Root and Taking One Out Are Different Jobs

Two different pieces of work get called root removal, and they carry different prices. Shaving takes the crown of a root that has humped above grade down flush with the soil and leaves the body of it whole underneath. Removal severs the root and takes the wood out along a length of it so that something else can occupy the space.

What that something else is drives every decision. A fence line wants the wood gone to about eighteen inches so an auger will turn without walking off the mark. A trench for a water line or a downspout drain wants a clean gap wide enough for the pipe and its bedding, with square ends rather than a torn hole. A patio or shed base wants the root out entirely under the footprint, because wood left under compacted gravel keeps shrinking long after the pavers are down.

Tell us what is going into the space and the depth answers itself. Ask for a root to be removed with nothing planned for the ground afterwards, and you are buying depth that nobody will ever use.

The Severed Root Is What Sends Up Shoots

When a line of shoots comes up across a lawn weeks after a tree was taken out, most people assume the stump was not ground deep enough. It usually was. Those shoots are rising off severed roots, sometimes twenty feet from where the trunk stood, and the stump has nothing to do with them.

The species that behave this way here are predictable. Box elder is the worst of them in the bottoms, hackberry does it along the alleys and back fences downtown, black locust does it hard on the old pasture ground northeast of town, and tree of heaven outruns all three if it is anywhere on the property. Sycamore, willow and the oaks largely do not.

Cutting the shoots off at ground level makes the problem worse, because every cut stem answers by branching. Mowing them repeatedly through a full season exhausts the reserves in the root. Where mowing is not practical, they have to be dealt with while they are in active growth and full leaf. What will not help is grinding more of the stump, and anyone offering that is selling you a second grind.

Where We Stop

Outside the town limits most lots run on septic, and the 1975 quarter-acre plats off Bandy Road and the 2001 half-acre lots on Caldwell Road have drainfields laid through exactly the part of the back yard where the shade tree went in. A wheel four inches into a lateral is an expensive afternoon, and no locate service will show those pipes to you. We want the field flagged, the tank lid pointed out, or the permit pulled from the county before a machine crosses that ground.

We also keep clear of well casings and pressure lines, retaining wall footings, and anything within a few inches of a foundation. A root that has already grown into a wall or a pipe is not a grinding job at all. That is excavation, and generally a plumber's excavation.

And we do not work past a boundary line unless the neighbour says so themselves, preferably in writing.

Root work we get asked for most on Cheatham County lots

• Clearing a post line so the auger turns instead of walking off the mark
• Cutting a clean gap through a root for a water line, a conduit or a downspout drain
• Taking wood out from under a patio or shed base before the gravel goes down
• Pulling a flare back off a new retaining wall or raised bed on the ridge lots
• Chasing leftovers from somebody else's grind, usually found the week sod was going down
• Severed roots throwing a line of box elder shoots along a fencerow
• Not this: a root inside a sewer lateral or under a footing, which is a dig and not a grind