Stump Grinding in Aberdeen Woods, Nashville 37220

The Aberdeen street trees are failing right on schedule

Whoever laid out Aberdeen Woods in the late seventies and eighties did what every developer did then and lined the curving Scottish-named streets with Callery pear. They were cheap, they grew fast, they flowered in March, and nobody knew yet that the species has a structural flaw: branches that all originate from nearly the same point on the trunk, forming unions with bark trapped inside them that cannot hold weight.

Forty years on, that flaw arrives with every ice storm. A pear splits down the middle, half of it lands on a car or a fence, and the rest has to come out because what is left is unbalanced and unsafe. It is rarely one tree. On a street where they all went in the same spring, a single storm can take out four or five, and then the stumps are on Cochran and Aviemore all at once.

Grind one of these shallow and you get a hedge

Callery pear does something most trees do not. Cut the roots and the surviving root fragments respond by throwing up shoots - not one or two, but dozens, and they carry the thorny rootstock the original tree was grafted onto. Homeowners who had a stump shaved down to ground level two springs ago now have a thicket in the same spot, and pulling it out by hand is a losing exercise.

So we treat pear differently from everything else in this subdivision. The stump comes down well below grade rather than flush, and more importantly the wheel follows the main laterals out from the trunk for several feet in each direction, because that is where the shoots come from. It adds fifteen or twenty minutes per stump. It also means you deal with it once instead of every March until you sell the house.

The rest of the trees the developer planted

Pear is not the only thing on these streets. Willow oak went in as a shade tree and those are now the largest things on many lots - dense, slow to grind and the ones that push a job into the higher price bracket. River birch was popular here too, usually multi-stemmed, which means three or four separate stems joined at the base and effectively three or four small stumps in a cluster rather than one round one. White pine screens along the back lines are at the age where they thin out and come down, and pine's resin gums a cutting wheel and stains a driveway if the chips sit on it.

Sweetgum is the one people ask about most - not for the tree but for the gumballs. Grinding the stump does not stop the ones already on the ground, but it does end the supply, and it is a common reason for a removal here rather than any defect in the tree.

Doing a whole street after a storm

When ice takes out several pears in a week, the neighbourhood tends to phone one at a time over a month, which is the most expensive way to do it. The efficient way is for a few houses to agree a morning. We bring the machine once, work down the street, and every household after the first is paying for grinding time rather than another mobilisation.

Sevenmile Creek and the greenway run along the edge of the subdivision and the ground back there holds water, so if your stump is on the low side of the lot we may sequence you later in the day or later in the week depending on how wet it has been. On the higher ground toward Edmondson Pike it makes no difference. Either way, the leaning and hung-up trees get attention first and the grinding follows on a normal schedule.