Tree Service in Wyoming, MI

The silver maple problem, and how to tell if you have one

Silver maple grows two or three co-dominant stems out of one point rather than a single central leader, and where those stems press together the bark gets trapped in the union instead of the wood knitting. That trapped bark is called an included bark seam and it is a crack waiting for a wet snow. When one of these fails it does not drop a branch, it splits half the tree off, usually onto whatever is closest.

Go and look at yours from twenty feet back. If the trunk divides into two roughly equal stems below about fifteen feet, and the crotch between them looks like a tight V with a dark seam rather than a rounded U, that is the one. It is not an emergency and it is very often fixable: end-weight reduction on both stems, or a cable installed a couple of thirds of the way up, and the tree carries on for decades. Reduction on a tree that size runs $800 to $2,000 and a cable install adds $400 to $700. Against a $1,000 to $2,500 removal plus the stump, and against losing a shade tree that keeps your Godwin Heights bungalow from cooking in August, it is usually worth doing.

Permits in Wyoming, which are simpler than in the City

Wyoming does not run a private-property tree ordinance. If the tree is inside your property lines you can have it removed without asking anybody, which is a genuine difference from what happens four miles north in East Grand Rapids and worth knowing before you get quoted for permit work you do not need.

The right-of-way is the exception, same as everywhere. Trees in the strip between your sidewalk and 28th Street SW, Byron Center Avenue SW, Gezon Parkway or any other public road belong to the city, and Wyoming's Public Works department handles requests to trim or remove them. The city also reserves the right to trim or take out a right-of-way tree itself where it decides public safety needs it. Call Public Works first; do not let a contractor talk you into touching one.

What we get called out for around here

Removals lead, mostly maple and ash, and the ash is the leftover of an emerald ash borer wave that went through Kent County years ago and left standing dead wood in back yards from Lamar Park to the Buck Creek corridor. Dead ash is the one we push people to deal with sooner rather than later, because once the wood goes brittle a climber will not tie into it and a $1,200 job becomes a $2,400 lift job.

Trimming is mostly clearance work: limbs off roofs on the low-eaved postwar ranches, and getting canopies up off the driveways on the narrow lots south of 36th. Stump grinding runs constantly because so much of the removal work here is in small yards where a stump is a real nuisance rather than a curiosity, and on a fourteen-inch maple stump in an open front yard that is a $150 to $280 job done in half an hour.

The commercial side is the 28th Street corridor and the apartment stock off Clyde Park and Burlingame: parking-lot island trees planted in too little soil, girdling themselves against the curb, and getting blamed for lifting the asphalt they were doomed by.