Family run in Kent County since 2011 · Fully insured, certificate of liability on request · ISA Certified Arborist walks every estimate · Storm calls answered around the clock
Tree TrimmingGrand Rapids, Michigan
Grand Rapids, Michigan · since 2011
Trimming, removal, stump grinding and arborist reports across Kent and Ottawa County. Trimming | Removal | Stumps | Storm damage | Tree health
Grand Rapids and the towns around it, since 2011. We publish our prices, we explain the City permit nobody else mentions, and we tell you when a tree does not need to come down.
Call (616) 297-2972 Or send photos
A person calls you back the same day, or first thing the next morning if you reach us after six. Storm calls get picked up whenever they come in.
What people say
Two other companies had already told me the big maple out front had to come down and I had more or less accepted it. Reid climbed it instead of looking at it from the driveway, was up there a good twenty minutes, and came down and said it had maybe fifteen years in it if we took the deadwood out and put a cable in where the trunk splits. I asked him twice whether he was sure because it seemed like he was talking himself out of a much bigger job. Cost me a bit over eight hundred instead of the twenty six hundred I had been quoted to remove it. That was two springs ago and the tree is fine.
Silver maple leaning over the garage, 1850 all in. Got three quotes. One guy was 1400 but wanted to leave the brush at the kerb, one was 3100 and would not put the crane price in writing which I did not love. These guys wrote down what it cost if they needed the crane and what it cost if they did not, then did not need it and charged me the lower one. Wife made them leave the chips for her beds.
Stump grind got pushed back twice and I was pretty annoyed because I had sod being delivered on the Saturday. To be fair Dale rang me both times rather than letting me find out when nobody turned up, and knocked forty dollars off. When they did come they ground it a lot deeper than the six inches on the quote without me asking. Grass took fine. Would use again, would also ask them to confirm the date twice.
Showed up when they said, did what they said, cleaned up after. Not much else to say.
Called them at about eleven at night in that March storm with a limb across the driveway and half the street out. He was honest and said we were behind two houses that had trees actually on them and it would be the morning, which I would rather hear than be told someone is on the way. They were there by seven. Cut it up, dragged it clear, and did not try to sell me the whole tree coming out while I was standing there in my dressing gown.
Before you call anyone
Why it matters
A forty-year-old red oak is not landscaping, it is a structural asset that took four decades to grow and cannot be replaced in your lifetime. The City puts a number on this: Grand Rapids street trees deliver air-quality, carbon and stormwater services valued at $371,791 every year across the roughly 75,000 trees the Forestry Division looks after. Your two out front are carrying their share of that, and a bad pruning cut takes years off them.
Topping is the big one. Cutting a maple back to stubs does not make it safer, it triggers a flush of weakly attached watersprouts that break out in the first real wind, and it opens decay columns down the trunk. We keep getting called to redo topping jobs, and by then the answer is usually removal. The other one is pruning an oak in June, which is a different and faster way to lose the tree.
Tree work is consistently among the more dangerous trades in the country, and Michigan requires no licence to do it. Anyone with a saw and a truck can quote your job. Ask for a certificate of liability and workers' compensation sent directly by the carrier rather than emailed as a PDF, and ask what happens if a limb goes through your neighbour's fence. We will hand you both before we start.
Tree Trimming Grand Rapids is a family-run tree service working Grand Rapids and the surrounding Kent and Ottawa County towns since 2011. We trim, we remove, we grind stumps, and we do the arborist work that decides which of those three a tree actually needs. Every estimate is walked by an ISA Certified Arborist and comes back as a written price rather than a number over the phone.
Our services include tree trimming and pruning, tree removal, emergency and storm damage tree service, stump grinding and stump removal, arborist consultations and tree risk reports, tree disease and insect treatment for oak wilt and emerald ash borer, land clearing and lot clearing, brush and poison ivy removal, tree planting, and commercial and municipal tree care. If you are looking for a tree company in Grand Rapids that will tell you a tree is fine, we are that.
Dale started this with one chip truck and a groundman in 2011 after nine years working for a bigger West Michigan tree service and getting tired of quoting removals on trees that wanted pruning. It is still small. Marcus and Tyler run the ground, Reid climbs, and the orange Kubota with the peeling decal on the tailgate is the entire fleet apart from the chip truck and the lift.
We work Grand Rapids proper and the ring around it: Wyoming, Kentwood, Grandville, Walker, East Grand Rapids, Comstock Park, Jenison, Byron Center, Cascade, Ada, Hudsonville and Rockford, plus Standale, Forest Hills, Caledonia, Allendale, Grand Rapids Township, Plainfield Township, Georgetown Township and Alpine Township. If your street is not on that list, call anyway. Anything inside about thirty-five minutes of the shop we will come and look at.
We come and look at it, we tell you what it needs, and you get a written price with the stump and the brush already on it.
Free written estimate Insured, COI on request We haul it or we leave the chips
What we do
Ten things, in roughly the order people call about them. Every one has its own page with real prices on it.
Branch scraping the roof every time the wind picks up?
Pruning takes the weight and the reach out of the limbs that matter and leaves the rest of the tree alone. Most trees need less cut than people think.
Tree trimming is the selective removal of specific branches to reduce risk, clear structures and improve a tree's long-term structure.
Dead ash by the driveway that gets a little more alarming every spring?
Removal, in sections if there is anything underneath it, with the stump quoted on the same sheet rather than as a surprise afterwards.
Tree removal in Grand Rapids costs $500 to $4,000 depending on height, access and what sits underneath the tree.
Tree across the drive at eleven at night with the power out?
Somebody picks up. We make it safe first and price the rest of it in the morning.
Emergency tree service is the same-day removal or stabilisation of a tree that is on a structure, across access, or into a power service drop.
Mowing around the same stump for the third summer running?
Grinding turns it into a pile of chips in under an hour on most residential stumps, and the hole gets backfilled the same visit.
Stump grinding in Grand Rapids costs $75 to $1,000 per stump depending on diameter, grind depth and access.
Somebody has told you the tree is dangerous and you want a second opinion in writing?
A written risk assessment says what the defect is, what it could hit, and what the options cost. Sometimes the answer is that the tree is fine.
An arborist consultation is a written assessment of a tree's condition, risk and management options, produced by a credentialed arborist rather than a salesperson.
Oak dropping green leaves in July, or an ash thinning from the top down?
Those are two specific diseases with two specific treatments and two very different windows. Both are cheaper than removal if you catch them.
Oak wilt and emerald ash borer cause more tree deaths in Kent County than any other cause, and both are treatable in the early stages.
Bought a wooded lot and the builder wants a pad by spring?
Selective clearing to the building envelope, mulched or hauled, with the trees worth keeping still standing and protected.
Land clearing is the removal of trees, brush and stumps from a site to prepare it for construction, agriculture or access.
Hairy vine running up the oak, and a rash every time you weed the fence line?
Cut, treated at the stump and removed rather than mulched, because a mulcher aerosolises it and everyone downwind pays for that.
Poison ivy in Michigan is identifiable by three leaflets on a stem with hairy aerial roots when climbing, and the oil that causes the rash remains active on dead plants for years.
Took one down and the front of the house looks naked?
The right species in the right spot, planted at the correct depth, which is the single thing most new trees in this city get wrong.
Tree planting in Grand Rapids costs $180 to $900 installed depending on caliper, and the City requires a free permit for any tree planted in the right-of-way.
Board asking why the same three trees keep generating work orders?
An inventory, a condition rating and a phased plan, so the budget stops being reactive and the documentation exists when somebody asks.
Commercial tree service covers scheduled maintenance, inventories and risk documentation for properties where the owner carries liability for tree failure.
Published prices
Tree removal in Grand Rapids costs about $1,100 on average and runs from roughly $400 to $1,900 for most residential jobs. Here is the honest breakdown by job type rather than one useless average.
| Job | Typical Grand Rapids range | What usually decides where you land |
|---|---|---|
| Small tree removal, under 30 ft | $500 to $1,000 | Ornamentals, young maples, small ash. A couple of hours for a two-person crew. |
| Medium tree removal, 30 to 60 ft | $1,000 to $2,500 | The common one. Silver maples, mid-size oaks, elms, most ash. Most of a day. |
| Large tree removal, 60 to 80 ft | $2,500 to $4,000 | Mature red oaks, cottonwoods, big white pines. A full day, sometimes two. |
| Citywide average, all removals | about $1,100 | Published Grand Rapids average sits inside a $400 to $1,900 spread. |
| Stump grinding, per stump | $75 to $1,000 | Diameter, grind depth, root flare spread, and whether the machine can reach it. |
| Three-person crew, hourly | $200 to $260 per hour | How trimming and storm work is usually priced when there is no single tree to quote. |
What pushes a job to the top of its range in this town: no rear access for anything wheeled, a target underneath it, dead ash that has gone brittle enough that a climber will not enter it, power service drops in the drop zone, and steep back yards on the ridge above the Grand River. What brings it down: open front yard, room to drop it whole, and letting us chip on site rather than hauling.
The full Grand Rapids tree removal cost breakdown has the add-ons, the crane contingency and a calculator that works off your own tree.
How it works
Most people hesitate because they do not know what they are agreeing to when they let somebody with a chainsaw into the garden. So here it is in order.
Tell us roughly where the tree is, what species if you know it, and what it is doing that worries you. Photos help more than descriptions. We come out and walk it, usually within two business days, and if it is leaning on something we come sooner than that.
No charge for the estimate and nobody sits at your kitchen table afterward.
You get a written quote listing the trees by location, what comes off each one, whether the stump is in or out, where the brush goes, and what a crane costs if access turns out to need one. Crane contingency gets priced up front rather than appearing as a change order on the day.
If a permit is needed because the tree is in the City right-of-way, we tell you that on the quote and we file it.
Drop zones roped, plywood down if we are rolling anything heavy across turf, brush chipped as we go rather than piled until the end. Chips go on the truck or stay in your beds, your call. Stump grinding is normally a second visit because it is a different machine, and we tell you the date before we leave.
We rake and blow. You should not be finding chunks of maple in your lawn in October.
One job, both ends of it
Storm on the 30th of March last year put an eighty mile an hour gust through the southeast side. This one did not come down. It moved, which is worse, because the owner could not tell whether it had finished moving.
Sixty-two foot silver maple, three feet off the garage corner, with a crack in the turf running six feet out from the trunk on the uphill side.
We walked a 60-foot tracked lift through the side gate, which is the whole reason we own one, and took it down in pieces over two days rather than dropping anything.
The other quote was three hundred dollars cheaper and involved a fence that would not have survived. We will show you the photos of the lifted root plate if you want to see what to look for in your own yard.
Worth understanding
Do not prune oaks in Grand Rapids between April 15 and July 15, and the City asks you to go further than that. The Michigan DNR sets the statewide high-risk window at April 15 to July 15, because sap-feeding beetles carry oak wilt spores into fresh pruning wounds and a red oak can be dead within weeks of infection. The City of Grand Rapids Forestry Division is stricter: its published guidance asks residents to avoid trimming oaks between April and September, and its current notice asks you to wait until late October. Almost no tree company in this market mentions the gap between those two dates, and it matters, because a contractor quoting you an August oak prune is working to the state calendar and not the city's. Winter is the right answer for oaks here. If an oak is wounded accidentally inside the window, paint the wound the same day.
You need a free City permit to prune or remove any tree in the Grand Rapids right-of-way, and no permit at all for a tree that sits inside your property lines. The right-of-way is the strip between the sidewalk and the street, and the trees in it belong to the City even though you mow around them. The permit covers anything with a mature height over three feet, it costs nothing, and Forestry reviews requests within three business days. Two things surprise people. First, the City will not do the work: an approved permit means you go and hire a company, and you are responsible for locating utilities. Second, you are not allowed to prune your own street tree yourself under any circumstances. The full walkthrough is on our Grand Rapids tree removal permit page.
Usually yes, by roughly ten to twenty percent, and in Grand Rapids the reason is frozen ground rather than slow season. A truck and a grinder on frozen turf leave almost no mark, so we do not have to price lawn repair or wait for a dry week. Deciduous trees are also easier to read and lighter to rig with the leaves off. The catch is that emergency work does not follow that curve at all: a storm week in January is the most expensive week of the year to get a crew, because everybody wants one at once. If the tree is not a hazard, book it for February.
The test is what percentage of the live crown you would have to take, and whether the defect is in the trunk or in the branches. Branch problems are usually prunable. Deadwood, a rubbing pair of limbs, a low branch over the driveway, one-sided growth after a neighbour's build: those come off and the tree carries on. Trunk problems usually are not. A cavity larger than about a third of the stem diameter, a crack running vertically, fungal conks at the base, a lifted root plate, or the included bark seam you get where two silver maple stems meet: those are structural and pruning does not fix them. There is a longer version with photographs on our trimming versus removal page.
The Grand Rapids Forestry Division has treated more than 1,400 City ash trees against emerald ash borer, but that programme covers street and park trees rather than anything in your back yard. Emerald ash borer arrived in Michigan in 2002 and it is the reason so much of the standing dead wood in Kent County yards is ash. Treatment works, and it is far cheaper than removal, but only on a tree that still has most of its canopy. Past roughly forty percent crown loss you are paying to slow something down rather than stop it. Dead ash also gets dangerous unusually fast, going brittle enough within a couple of seasons that a climber will not enter it, which is when the price jumps because the job becomes a lift or a crane job.
Ask both whether the stump is included and to what depth, and whether the brush leaves with them. Then ring us and we will tell you what the answers mean.
Free written estimate Insured, COI on request We haul it or we leave the chips
Where we work
We run out of a yard and a chip truck rather than a storefront, so we publish the towns we cover instead of a street address. Nobody chooses a tree service by walking into a lobby. Every town below has its own page with that community's own rules on it, because they genuinely differ: East Grand Rapids runs a stricter street-tree ordinance than the City of Grand Rapids does, and Cascade is in the middle of rewriting its tree provisions altogether.
Wyoming Tree Service Kentwood Tree Service Grandville Tree Service Walker Tree Service East Grand Rapids Tree Service Comstock Park Tree Service Jenison Tree Service Byron Center Tree Service Cascade Tree Service Ada Tree Service Hudsonville Tree Service Rockford Tree Service
Before you sign anything
We are insured and Michigan licenses nobody. There is no state tree service or arborist licence in Michigan at all, so any company printing a licence number on its truck is printing something else. What is real and checkable: a certificate of liability and workers' compensation sent to you directly by our carrier rather than forwarded as a PDF, and an ISA Certified Arborist credential, which you can verify yourself through the International Society of Arboriculture's public directory. Ask every company you talk to for both. The ones who get quiet are telling you something.
Same day, and we answer the phone through the night during storms. The 30 March 2025 event put gusts above eighty miles an hour through metro Grand Rapids and Cascade and knocked out more than 200,000 Consumers Energy customers statewide, and Kent County counted twenty to thirty homes damaged mostly by falling trees and limbs. On a night like that the honest answer is that we triage: anything on a structure, across a driveway or into a service drop goes first, and a limb lying harmlessly on a lawn waits until morning. We will tell you which one you are.
It is a separate line on our quote and we would rather you saw it than found out later. Grinding uses a different machine on a different trailer, so for most companies in this market it is a second trip, which is exactly why it gets quietly dropped from cheap removal quotes. Standard for us is six to eight inches below grade, deeper if you are re-seeding, and we backfill with the grindings unless you want soil. Worth knowing that the City batches its own stump grinding on public trees and warns that a stump can sit for months waiting on the contractor, so if a City tree came out in front of your house in Kentwood or anywhere else, the delay is not somebody forgetting about you.
Your choice, and it changes the price. We chip on site and either load the chips or leave them, and rounds get cut to stove length and stacked if you want firewood. Leaving the chips is cheaper because we are not paying to tip them. Do not move ash firewood out of the area, which is the whole reason emerald ash borer got as far as it did. The City also gives residents free wood chips at its yard waste drop-off site from the first Monday in April to the second Saturday in December if you want more than one job produces.
Anything touching the primary lines is the utility's job, not ours, and we will tell you to call them rather than quoting it. What we do handle is the service drop, the line running from the pole to your own house, which is usually insulated and is usually the one with a limb resting on it. On a job like that in Grandville we will normally have the drop temporarily dropped or sleeved before anyone climbs. If you are not sure which line you are looking at, send a photo.
For stump grinding and small ornamentals, often yes. For anything over about thirty feet, no, and any company that gives you a firm number for a sixty-foot maple sight unseen is either padding it heavily or has not thought about how they are getting the machine into your back yard. Access is most of the price. Send photos including one that shows the gate or the side of the house and we can usually get you a range the same day, then confirm it on site.
A person calls you back the same day, or first thing the next morning if you reach us after six. Storm calls get picked up whenever they come in.
Prefer to talk? Ring (616) 297-2972. Photographs help more than descriptions, and one that shows the gate or the side of the house is worth three of the tree.