Tree Service in Jenison, MI

Who actually has jurisdiction

Georgetown Charter Township for local matters. Ottawa County, not Kent County, for anything at county level, which includes the road commission that controls the right-of-way on a good number of the roads through the community. Trees inside your own property lines are yours and involve neither.

The practical version: if the tree is in your yard, hire someone and get on with it. If it is in the strip by the road, find out whether the road is a township road or an Ottawa County road before anybody cuts anything, because the answer determines who you are asking and the wrong answer is a problem you own.

Post-war and post-1970 stock, and the pine belt

Jenison built out largely from the fifties onward and then heavily again from the seventies, which produces a mixed picture: some genuinely mature maple and oak in the older streets near Chicago Drive and Baldwin Street, and a lot of forty-to-fifty-year-old trees in the subdivisions behind them that are now hitting the age where the structural decisions made when they were young come due.

There is more planted conifer here than in most of our route: Colorado blue spruce, Austrian pine, white pine, planted as screening and windbreak and now well past the size the planting plan imagined. Blue spruce in particular is in trouble across West Michigan with needle cast diseases, and the honest answer for most of them is that you can slow it and you cannot stop it. Where a screening row is failing, replanting with a mixed row rather than another monoculture of the same species is the thing that actually works.

The regular work

Removals and stump grinding lead, especially on the subdivision lots where a spruce row has died back and the owner wants the lot opened up again. Trimming is mostly clearance and deadwood. Storm work after events, with the caveat that we are seventeen minutes out here rather than eight, so on a genuinely bad night Jenison is not first in the queue and we will tell you that honestly rather than saying we are on our way.

One thing worth flagging: Ottawa County has its own invasive species pressures and the ash situation here is the same as everywhere else in West Michigan, which is to say the dead ones are still standing and getting more expensive to remove every season.